DS: Reborn
by Thor2000
Summary: The Collins Family in the 1990s is sent back in time to overlap with the family in the 1790s, rewriting the past as a result. This story follows Ally McBeal: Promises and DS: Motherhood.
1. Chapter 1

Alexandra Moltke voice-over: "Collinwood in the year 1998 is a year of peace and good fortune. The evil spirits of the past are long gone, and Barnabas and Angelique are happily married with two grown children. To add to the joy of the family, their son, William, has married the true love of his life, a female lawyer named Ally from the town of Boston in an elopement that carried them to New York City, but Angelique will not allow them to take away the grand wedding she wants for her first born son. Little does she know is that her efforts to ensure the happiness and joy in the family will invariably wake up the spirits of the past that she long hopes will remain buried.

The main hall of Collinwood was decorated with flowers and expensive designs and floral arrangements. It had been years since the last wedding on the estate, and Angelique and Carolyn were managing the entire thing with the assistance of Jennie McBeal, Ally's mother, and Rachel Fillmore-Collins, Roger's wife, who owned and ran Forever Catering in town. The last wedding on the estate had been Willie and Carolyn in a very small tight family and friends gathering, but this arrangement was going to be ten times bigger than that with a band, an open bar and the old ballroom filled up with chairs to the walls before a pulpit area for the happily already-married couple to repeat their vows in a private ceremony. Three hundred invitations had been sent out, and two hundred and eighty-five guests were expected to arrive. Local deputy police officer Bruno Hess came as a friend of the family, but current Sheriff Don Taylor arrived in his capacity to maintain security as an occasional helicopter buzzed the estate taking photos and trying to chance on the happy couple. He and retired sheriff George Patterson even crossed paths a few times to share news and compare notes. Sara Collins ran through pretending to ignore Joe Haskell Jr. in attendance; their relationship now on the rocks once again as lawyer Richard Fish eyed the beautiful blonde heiress and wondered if she too could marry a lawyer.

On this the day of his wedding, William was in his best suit, actually his only suit, as friends from far and old came to see him married. Having barely seen him the week before, Ally was in Lizzie's room in the main house with Sara and Lizzie to run around and help run her errands. Elaine was her messenger from the room to William and everyone else. Renee was handling her legal responsibilities in Boston. Everything was happened, but Ally was more nervous now then when she actually said, "I do," in Manhattan in front of Harry, Mac and Christine. Her heart was beating fast. She was worried she was sweating, and yet, she loved the fact that her sister was so jealous of her for a change.

"Ally…" Elaine held a piece of paper to Ally. "Your lips…"

"Honestly, Elaine?"

"Too much lipstick is not a good look when you're getting ready to get married." She had Ally press her lips around the paper.

"What are you talking about?" Lizzie scowled confused. "Her lipstick is perfect!"

"Of course, you would say that…" Elaine looked to Lizzie. "From what I hear, there's should be a revolving door for guys where your window is."

"What?!" Lizzie reared her fingernails as both Sara and Ally grabbed Lizzie and pulled her from Elaine. Someone knocked at the door of the bedroom, and Sara turned to answer it. Ally looked up from Lizzie's vanity table expecting her mother with her fixed veil, but it wasn't her. It was a person from the past. A shapely brunette beauty with big brown eyes and long thin dancer's legs extending beyond her skirt stood in the hall. Sara and Ally recognized her immediately.

"Paula!" Ally looked unprepared as the old love interest came up to the room as Ally stood in her mother's wedding dress. "What are you doing here?"

"Someone invited me to your wedding." The struggling brunette singer grinned defeatedly. "Trying to rub it in?"

"Like you wouldn't have had you married William." Ally grinned as Sara and Elaine listened to the verbal catfight.

"Ally…" Sara came up to Ally. "You invited William's old girlfriend?"

"No, I did not!"

"There you are!" Amanda came up into Lizzie's room and closed the door behind her. "That's her." She pointed to Ally. "The enemy."

"You invited Paula?" Lizzie reacted. "Amanda, why would you do that?"

"I was invited by the psycho?" Paula remembered Amanda. On her first date with William in the Eighties, she had been poisoned by her and spent the weekend in the hospital while Amanda followed William to Bangor. When William tried to get away with Paula again, he got a fake phone call to go to Pennsylvania to join Jason and Grant at the Old Allegheny State Penitentiary. The red-haired heiress was somewhere behind the scenes of every ruined outing between William and Paula, and now, she considered Paula her secret weapon to stop this marriage from happening.

"I am not a psycho!" Amanda looked at her. "My mother had me tested!"

"If you see her pull a rifle out…" Lizzie whispered into Ally's ear. "Run for it and don't look back!" She hugged Ally and motioned out of the room. Behind her, Elaine and Amanda stared each other down as Ally's mother came to check on them. The wedding was ready to start. Elaine shined to Ally a moment more then turned out of the room with Amanda right behind her. The wild heiress scowled a bit displeased and started down the corridor for the spiral stairs in the tower. Right before them, Elaine pulled her away from the second floor landing.

"No, I know you did that on purpose." Elaine stared Amanda back. "Both of us have had a secret crush on William, but you're is just that more psychotic because you're his cousin."

"We're seventh cousins five times removed…." Amanda stated then rolled her eyes a bit unsure. "Or something like that… We've share Joshua Collins as a common ancestor."

"Don't care!" Elaine moved her finger in front of Amanda's face. "Ally is still my best friend; and if I hear you're making a problem in her wedding, I'm taking you out."

"Shake that finger in my face one more time…" Amanda bared her teeth. "And I'm breaking it!"

"Amanda…" Maggie had come up stairs with the needle and thread William's mother needed to quickly mend Ally's wedding dress. Amanda looked to her mother, back to Elaine and then marched past her mother carrying her personal demons with her. The attractive councilwoman gasped a moment and tried to muster her strength. She unconsciously debated sending Amanda back to Windcliff.

"Elaine, I'm so sorry…" She finally spoke. "Amanda is…"

"Mrs. Collins…" Elaine spoke. "I know Amanda has had a torch for William since they were kids. He confided to me in his e-mails how it made it uncomfortable, but I'm not letting her push me around because I'm not going to take it."

"It's not just this torch she has for him…" Maggie didn't understand why she was spilling these details to a friend of her nephew. "She's been short-tempered and moody since she heard about the William and Ally eloping to Manhattan. All I'm asking… please don't start a fight with her. I'm stressed out right now, and I don't need to be pulling her off anyone at the reception." She heard voices coming up the stairway to the second floor. Brian and Joe Hackett were looking for the upstairs bathroom in order to sneak a tour of the house before the ceremony, but as Maggie went to help Ally, Elaine shined knowing she had distracted Brian into following her back downstairs. They took opposite sides of the same room across from each other in the Collinwood ballroom. A few chairs ahead, Amanda morosely and lackluster tried to be a part of the family affair as her father sat and talked to her Uncle Willie. She seemed to be able to survive this spectacle for now, but then the music started and her mother joined her. As Ally appeared in the room to join her cousin in matrimony, Amanda rolled her eyes and pretended to be distracted by a flower hanging precariously from its pot on the side of the room. As Reverend James Holliman from the Collinsport Baptist Church conducted the religious ceremony, she sighed and her mother looked briefly at her to be a more quiet. Her white face resting bored on her slender neck bored and discontent, she tried harder to pretend to care. Her cousin was getting married to this skinny lady lawyer from Boston. What about her? She was taller than Ally, more shapely and she had long curly red hair. She could make him a much more better husband. What was going to happen to her now? Was she destined to struggle through one jerk after another? Guys who only cared about getting into her underwear and her bank account? Where was her future going? She suddenly saw her herself dying lonely and alone and a tear fell from her eye. William and Ally started their vows as she gasped then stood up, brushed past Lizzie and J.R. and raced from the room with her heart breaking. Maggie started to rise to go after her, but Quentin stopped her.

"Let her go…" He whispered. "She needs to accept this."

Rushing through the dining room as the caterers set up for the reception, Amanda dodged one of the people in her way and out the back door near the back veranda. Her heart was pounding as she ran down the stairs to the rear grounds and to the back driveway. Pausing briefly to hold herself up on a tree, she broke free with her eyes full of tears. Yes, William was her cousin, but he was her first love ever since they were kids. She just naturally thought they'd get married. On the back driveway, she left a trail of tears toward Rose Cottage on the property. Her chest was heaving with emotion. Here eyes were clouded with emotion. She burst into the house and stormed the staircase crying and screaming her sorrow out for the estate to hear it. Even the ghosts of the property shared in her misery, looked up and shared in her loss from afar. The red-haired beauty broke into her bedroom, kicked her pink teddy bear across the room and stood before her full-length mirror.

"Where are you?" Amanda searched the mirror in her bedroom for a face in it she had once seen. "Where are you?! You promised to help me! You promised me that you would stop this wedding from ever happening!" A figure appeared in the mirror behind her. The room behind her was empty, but the spirit of the sorceress bound to the reflection was powerful enough to elude death. She was the Countess Guinevere Alexandra De Constantine Von Altebar, and long before Isaac Collins founded Collinsport, she was a sorceress in liege with the ancient Catholic Church until they turned against her and abducted her children. Beautiful, blonde and devious, she had appeared in modern times calling herself Cheryl Harridge. Her spirit in the mirror appeared wearing the old French dress she wore in the Middle Ages and stood behind Amanda's reflection in the mirror.

"Bide your time, Amanda…" Cheryl whispered to her. "Do you recall the secrets I told you?"

"Yes…" Amanda knew now all the dark secrets of her family that had been kept from her. Her Uncle Barnabas as a former vampire, her Aunt Angelique as the witch who had made him so…. Even her father a former werewolf formerly enchanted by a cursed portrait. She knew it all now. Old curses now erased and forgotten, but Amanda would invoke all of it once more to get what she wanted. "But how does knowing all this going to stop William from getting married?"

"You must let me in."

"In?" Amanda didn't understand magic. "Don't you mean out? How do I get you out of the mirror?"

"No, sweetheart…" Cheryl grinned to her motherly. "In you. I cannot cast spells from this mirror. You must be the medium of my power."

"I don't know."

"Wouldn't you do anything to make William yours?" Cheryl tempted her.

"Yes."

"Then trust me." When Cheryl touched Amanda's reflection in the mirror, the red-haired heiress felt it in the real world. Clutching the mirror frame, she felt the powerful sorceress entering her body. It was like feeling electricity going through her body, and her head and chest becoming lighter than air. In the reflection, Cheryl Harridge held Amanda's body and pulled it against herself, their images in the reflection passing over each other. Amanda thrust her head back willing it to happen. A slight tear wafted down her cheek.

"Yes…" Amanda trembled in excited fear. "William, I'm doing this for you…."


	2. Chapter 2

2

The wedding reception had lasted until long after midnight. Guests and family had clinked glasses until deep into the wedding hours. What had been predicted as a seasonably warm day without rain, however, had turned dark. Clouds had descended over the estate. Despite the strange weather, the wedding went off on a good note, and William and Ally stayed the night at his house in Collinsport and planned to depart the following morning for their honeymoon in Martinique; it was a gift from his parents. Angelique helped Carolyn clean up some of the mess from the guests for a while, but then decided to leave the rest of it until the morning. After midnight, the unexpected rainstorm was pummeling the estate. No one could see the town from the hill because of it. Quentin drove Barnabas and Angelique back to the Old House, and the proud parents were already discussing names for grandchildren when they retired for bed. The former sorceress retired with her head on her husband's shoulder as usual, but when she woke the next morning, she was on the edge of the bed. She took a deep breath ready to rise and looked around the room, but she failed to recognize it. She was not at home!

"Barnabas!" She prodded her husband awake. "Barnabas!" He awoke with a full beard instead of his shaved handsome features. He immediately noticed the changes as well and clutched at his beard. This was not their room. It was their furniture, but not their room.

"This is Elizabeth's room at the main house!" Barnabas rose in his flannel pajamas. "How did we get here?"

"We are in the main house!" Angelique looked out the window. The roof of the Old house was still in the distance, but the view was somehow clearer. The trees were not as full. The lighthouse that been lost by the storm in 1957 was back where it once was. Something had happened. "This is our furniture. Look…" She picked up a woodcarving. "I purchased this in 1797 after you traveled back in time to help Vicki."

"This is not what I was wearing last night." Barnabas was equally confused if not more. "I retired in the blue pajamas you had bought for me. Angelique, is this a spell?"

"My cell phone is not here!" Angelique studied the room. She was still middle-aged, but she was subtly older than that, maybe in her sixties despite the fact she had stopped aging in her late thirties. "No light switch! No electrical lights… Barnabas, are we back in 1795?" They looked at each other.

"If we are…" He grasped distraughtly confused as his silver and gray beard. "Why are we in the main house instead of the Old House?" Angelique stared at him waiting to take charge. "Compose yourself." He looked around and found a man's house frock and pulled it on himself. "I'll go down and get some answers. I'll come back at get you."

"I'm far more capable than that." She grabbed a long house coat to pull over her nightdress and followed her husband out of the room. If they were in Elizabeth's room, where were Willie and Carolyn? They had moved into her room three years after Elizabeth had passed away. The clues they had traveled back in time were more and more. Kerosene lamps dotted the upstairs hallway, and furniture that had been stored away years ago now filled the corridor at the top of the staircase to the downstairs back hall off the drawing room. The portrait of Joshua and Naomi Collins was missing from the dining room. All the renovations Carolyn had carried out in 1995 had been undone. In the kitchen, a log burning stove rested in the place of the electric stove. The dishwasher was gone and the family blackboard for messages was replaced for the bare wall. As Barnabas turned around confused and nervously paranoid, Angelique peeked into the pantry. Two large pork sides hung in there. There was no refrigerator. Everything had reverted back to what the estate was in 1795.

There was a noise. Someone was coming along the walkway in the garden, through the gate outside the kitchen and toward the back door. Angelique saw the huge figure in the window briefly before he came in. She turned around and recognized the face of Ben Stokes as an old man. He was thinner than she remembered, and his brown hair was a faded gray. He wore the same tweed jacket and breech pants that she remembered.

"Ben…" Barnabas was stunned to see him alive. "You're alive."

"Or what passes for it…" Ben's gravelly voice answered. "I was already up so I thought I'd bring you the morning firewood for breakfast. I know I don't have to, but I promised your father on his deathbed I'd look after you. I still vow to carry out that promise."

"My father…" Barnabas anxiously looked to Angelique and back to the man he adored as a child. "Ben, excuse me, but I'm a bit confused…"

"Ben," Angelique stepped forward. "What's the date today?"

"May 25…"

"The year, Ben."

Ben looked at him as of Barnabas was a bit touched or addled.

"1820…"

Barnabas and Angelique looked at each other stunned and confused. They knew where they were, but they did not know the how or the why? Did someone alter the past? Was this where they would have been if history had been changed? Angelique turned to brace herself on the counter.

"Master Barnabas, I don't understand."

"Ben, please excuse my questions, but if you would so indulge me…" Barnabas adjusted his frock. "Who is master of Collinwood here?"

"Well, you are…" Ben looked at them. Angelique clutched her chest, and Barnabas tried to bravely absorb the stunned news. It was just as his father had wanted. He was master of Collinwood, and Angelique was his wife, but how? Why? What had happened to them?

"Barnabas, is there anything wrong?"

"No, Ben…"

"Okay, " Ben had placed the firewood by the stove and turned to head out the rear door. "Now, if you won't be needing me, I'm going to take the coach to pick up your sister and her husband at the at the docks. I imagine they'll be needing their room turned down if they're staying for young William's wedding."

"My sister?" Barnabas turned excitedly. "Sara? She's alive as well?"

"And William?" Angelique had forgotten about her children in her confusion. "What about my daughter? Where's my daughter, Sara?"

"Probably still asleep in their rooms…" It was now Ben's turn to be confused. "Master Barnabas, are you sure you two are okay?"

"Yes, Ben…" Barnabas tried to control his anxious glee and awkward confusion. "Just go about your duties… We'll be all right."

"Of course…" He turned to head out. Left behind as the masters of Collinwood, Barnabas now sat down as Angelique looked at him and grasped his hand. She forced a nervous chuckle and looked around unsure what to say. They looked across the table in a strange world.

"This is not the past." Her rich azure eyes looked as if they were descending into madness. "Barnabas, this is… another band of time."

"Like the room in the east wing…" Barnabas recalled a haunted room in the house that glimpsed other versions of Collinwood in other realities. It had been boarded up years ago to keep the children out of it, but he knew very well of it through his encounters with it.

"Yes…" Angelique tried to keep her composure. "Some force has placed us here, the children… perhaps the rest of the family. All of us somehow reverted to our past time counterparts."

"But why?" Barnabas asked the question. "For what reason?"

"I don't know…" Angelique looked to him and stroked his new beard fondly. "But we must play these roles until we find out."

"Good morning, Barnabas…" Naomi Collins strolled in supporting herself on a cane. She was Barnabas's mother. She was very much up in age now, a woman at the crisp age of seventy-five living with her children and grandchildren. Still sharp as a tack at her age, she strolled in looking at the cold stove and looked around the kitchen. "No coffee, Angelique?"

"Oh, yes, of course…" Angelique hurriedly and befuddledly rose to fill the stove with wood to boil the water. She took down the kettle and pumped the water at the sink, reverting quickly to her life in pre-Civil War America. Barnabas turned to a boy again before his mother. Rising from his chair, he rose to meet her and was horrified to see her so old. When he last saw her, she was forty-two and a beautiful woman, but now her hair was tinged with silver and she was as thin as a skeleton. Her bright blue eyes had clouded a bit, and her white complexion was mottled with spots on her forehead. She looked up to him expecting him to say something.

"Mother," Barnabas was humbled before her. "You look as beautiful as always."

"And you're just now noticing?" She lowered herself slowly into her chair as a servant in a blue-gray dress brought her shawl to her. Angelique looked over as the young lady assisting Naomi helped to prepare breakfast for the family. Her daughter, Sara, appeared very Mennonite in her period dress and very natural without her Twentieth-Century makeup, but her appetite was still the same, only eating biscuits with fresh farm jam and a few pieces of bacon with a cup of milk. Barnabas shined to see William in the period clothes, but his hair was longer and his beard was shaved off by straight razor instead of by an electric razor, but neither of the two knew or felt the house was any different. To them, they had always lived in 1820. Young Sara was a young single beauty, and instead of being a writer, William was a stalwart member of the community who worked in the mayor's office, but it was not the same for everyone.

"Barnabas…" Quentin arrived to meet him just as confused as Barnabas and Angelique. "When I woke up in the Old House, I thought I had just got really drunk last night, but Maggie is insisting she's Josette Collins."

"Josette?!" Barnabas scratched his beard and plotted to shave it. It had been two hours since breakfast, and Barnabas was just about to head to the Old House for answers when Quentin appeared at the door. "She's alive?"

"Apparently…" Quentin headed to the liquor cabinet in the drawing room where it had been for over three hundred years. "Now, according to the snippets of dialogue I got from her… I married her in 1795 after you married Angelique."

"Well, " Barnabas was somewhat irked by this revelation. "That's not exactly what happened, but go on…"

"Jamison and Amanda are here too, but they have no memory I can tell of their lives in the future." Quentin continued.

"Neither do William or Sara…" Barnabas dramatically turned away from him out of nervous tension. "And I have not yet seen Willie or Carolyn either or the rest of the kids, but there is one thing I do understand. Quentin, this is not the past. This is a distorted version of it. William still thinks he's marrying Ally. He went to present himself to her parents coming up from Boston. They are here too!"

"What the hell is going on here?" Quentin downed his sherry and paused. "Have you checked the family history?"

"It hasn't been written yet." Barnabas stood by him. "We have no guide, no answers… we seem to be merely players in this strange world."

"I have a theory." Quentin had been thinking about the parallel time room. "Is it possible…" There was a roar of noise outside the house. The horse drawn coach had pulled up outside the front veranda. Ben's voice called them to calm down and a woman's voice yelled at someone. There were more yells and someone rushed to the door. Fighting with the entryway, Willie Loomis came rushing in wearing his clothes of the time. Dress in a long leather jacket with a fine suit underneath, he charged the foyer and quickly noticed Barnabas and Quentin.

"Barnabas? Quentin?" He came to them. "Is that you? Please tell me its you!"

"Yes, Willie…" Both Barnabas and Quentin tried to calm him. "It's us. Are you okay? Where's Carolyn?"

"She's not here." Willie confessed as if he was going mad. "I mean – the kids are here, but she's not. Barnabas, you'll never guess who I'm married to!"

"William Hollingshead Loomis!" His wife called. She wore a period floor length dress with a traveling cloak and the hood pulled up over her head. Still as full-figured she was in the future, Lizzie came up behind her to help her with it. "Why did you charge in here without helping me from the coach?" She pulled back her hood and handed it to Lizzie. She looked very much like Carolyn did with the long hair back and without the Twentieth-century face-lift, but when she looked at Barnabas, her face filled with pride and admiration. "There's my handsome brother. Barnabas, no hug for your sister, Sara?" She grinned toward him.


	3. Chapter 3

3

Nancy Barrett voice-over: "Collinwood in 1820. Some force has taken the family back in time and exchanged them for their past time counterparts. Only a few of the family have managed to retain their memories of the real world while the younger Collins family members have not. It is a strange and mysterious world where Barnabas never experienced the curse that shaped Collinwood as we know it, but for what purpose or reason has this happened and how will things be restored to what they were."

It was an imperfect version of the past. All the people were here, but the roles mystically altered. Quentin was now the younger brother of Melanie Collins from New York, and the second husband of Josette DuPres-Collins, the widow of Jeremiah Collins. Barnabas's young sister, the first Sara Collins, was alive and married to Willie Loomis, a foreign temporal dignitary to this time period. Their brother, Daniel Collins, was also alive, now a father himself with two young sons named Quentin and Gabriel by Edith Collins. Family past and present was merging in an alternate version of 1820 for the wedding of William Benjamin Collins to Allison Marie McBeal, the young daughter of George and Jenny McBeal of Boston. The ship's journey up the coast was fair, but the carriage ride up from town was difficult and arduous, and despite Maine now being a state in the Union, most people like Ally's parents still considered it nothing but forests and thick wild land. Collinwood heir William Collins had met them at the shipyards and lead the coach to the estate by horseback.

"Finally an oasis of civilization in this God-forsaken wilderness…" George McBeal the Boston attorney arrived at Collinwood by coach that afternoon and looked around the estate approvingly. "I was worried what I might see after seeing the shape of that port!"

"George, do not offend our daughter's fiancé…" Jennie emerged in her long skirts and Victorian dress ahead of her daughter and young servant. She too looked up and over the large two-story mansion. It was as long as their block in Boston with a pitched roof and many garret windows from the servant's rooms in the attic. The front of the house had a raised portico of stone and mortar on the way to the entrance, and beyond that was a large castle-like tower and turret. The structure had both Victorian and Gothic influences in it. Blocking out the sun in the sky was the East Wing whose first floor contained the first floor ballroom. George looked at it with restrained interest. These Collins seemed as well off as his daughter had implied. Proud to approve her choice in husbands, he still struggled to approve of his future son-in-law without meeting him. Behind him, Ally stepped from the carriage with her friend Elaine in this reality as her indentured servant.

"Ally, my love…" Dropping from his horse, William took her hand and kissed it as this period mandated his customs. "My heart flutters with your approach." He held her hand to stroke it, but Ally discreetly pulled it away. "The servants have been preparing your rooms in the East Wing all morning. One for your parents, one for yourself and your sister and another for your brothers…."

"Andrew couldn't make the ship." George walked with Ally beyond William with his wife by his side. Elaine had hung back to direct the Collins servants where to take the baggage. "He'll by coming up by horse, but Spenser and Sondra are in town. They'll be up later."

"Father, mother, what do you think of Collinwood?" Ally looked to her parents as William led her by the arm.

"Ally, dear…" Jennie sighed a bit. "Why do you want to live all the way up here in Maine when there are so many nice houses closer to us?"

"I desire to live with my husband and his family." Ally shined and looked to William. "He is to be the next master of Collinwood; why would I desire to live anywhere else?" She too had been overcome by the Early Nineteenth Century and had forgotten her life in the Twentieth Century. She had been a lawyer, a career woman… In this day and age, the man she took as her husband was meant to define her. She did not know it any other way.

"I would do anything to make Ally happy." William looked to her. "If she desires a home in Boston, I would build it for her myself." Another sound distracted him for the moment. Another carriage had emerged from the tree line at the bottom of the hill and was now winding its way up the long carriage path up the hill.

"George and Jennifer…" Barnabas came out to pretend to meet them again for the first time. Looking to his son briefly, he shook George's hand and once more recalled his old-fashioned 18th Century etiquette by bowing to Ally's mother and taking her hand. They too had had been pulled into this twisted Old World version of the future. Elaine Vassal the office manager of Ally's law firm had been forced into the role of servant in this weird new reality. The 1990s had shaped her personality, but without it, she was a mere shadow of herself, left to cater to Ally and her family.

"Mr. Collins…" George shook Barnabas's hand trustily. "It's an honor to meet you. Your family home and estate is very impressive.

"Yes, it is…" Barnabas looked to William to remind him to lead the ladies into the mansion. Entering the house under the arches lining the alcove before the entrance, he guided the McBeals into the main house and they stood at the bottom of the main hall and foyer. Up to their left, they noticed the archways taking the main hall to the dining room and ballroom while the modest mahogany staircase to their right ascended to the second floor and the large stained glass window overlooking the foyer. Across from them, the drawing room was the heart of the estate where many family members retreated after dinner for many a hearty conversation and even a heavy argument from time to time. From the direction of the music room beyond the archway, William's younger sister emerged with her long blonde hair tied into a bun to reveal the slender dainty frame of her modest figure.

"So this is Collinwood…" Ally's brown eyes came to life as she turned and observed her husband's home. "It's more incredible than you described."

"Only because you make it so…" William charmed her and pulled her close. His sister cleared her throat near him.

"Oh, yes," William looked to his sister by the doors to the drawing room. "Ally, my sister, Sara Elizabeth Collins."

"Charmed…"

"So you're the one who has chained the beast my brother once was…" Sara looked to her father standing perturbed and distractedly and then to her brother. Her father had been so nervous and preoccupied recently. She thought it was over the wedding coming to the family, but she also noticed he'd been having secret conversation with her Uncle Willie and Uncle Quentin. Her mothers sometimes joined in the talk, but she could never quite get close enough to hear their conversations.

"So, who is to conduct the wedding?" Jennie finally asked.

"A local Presbyterian minister from Salem…" William escorted his in-laws to the dining room to ply them with wine and small sandwiches. "Reverend Silas Trask, a former witch hunter, I hear…"

Hesitating from following, Barnabas stopped and froze in place, his face contorting with annoyed reservation and strained exasperation. Trask? That raving maniac who had accused Victoria and then himself of witchcraft in the original timeline? He was still alive? Trying to contort himself with dignity under these strange circumstances, Barnabas heard the noises of the second carriage having reached the top of the hill. The Collins coachman had dispatched the previous one as servants carried off the McBeal's luggage to their guest rooms. Pressed with the responsibility of meeting all of his guests, Barnabas palmed and fretted with his beard with his right hand and returned to the front veranda of the estate, standing at the top of the stone steps facing the eastern sky. This coach was less grand than the last. It was smaller with suitcases packed on top than on the rear. Drawn by two strong dirty white steeds, it was drawn to a halt right at the time the door snapped open and its passenger stepped forward.

"Mr. Collins…" The thin frame of Peter Bradford stepped from within it. "We meet again."

"Peter Bradford…" Barnabas was stunned to see him again. He had been the lawyer who had defended Victoria Winters, the 1960s Collinwood governess who had been sent back in time to 1795. He had even traveled to the future that was once 1968 to reunite with her and take her back to the past with him. If Barnabas and the family had been thrust back in time, why shouldn't he meet Peter again and hear of his life with Victoria since they were last together!

"It has been a long time, hasn't it?" Peter shook Barnabas's hand and then quickly let go to reach behind him. Garbed in a riding cloak, his wife stepped from the carriage and her arms rose to pull back her hood. Victoria raised her head up to Barnabas stunned to be reunited with her.

"Hello, Barnabas…" Her bright face shined. "A very long time…."


	4. Chapter 4

4

A shocked and surprised look from Angelique toward Barnabas accompanied her reunion with Victoria. She was terrified at first; after all, it had been Vicki who had deduced she was the real witch in the original timeline, but in this revised history, she learned that after Barnabas had slain his brother, Jeremiah, over the love of Josette DuPres, that Victoria and Angelique had become friends and bonded over caring for Barnabas during his resulting sickness. In this revised history, Victoria seemed to have no memories of coming from the future. She and Peter had married, moved to Bangor and had a son, Peter, now a young cadet at West Point. Vicki had become the wife of a lawyer in the Bangor elite among the other wives of other career-minded men, but she had forever stayed close to the Collins family and was very well liked by the children.

"Victoria…" Josette arrived from the Old House with Quentin. "Welcome back to Collinsport." The two ladies regaled each other and held each other hands with all the etiquette of the British Royal Family. "I'm sorry I have not been to Bangor to see you, but… the demands of my life here…"

"I understand…"

"Victoria…" Quentin gasped nervously and gestured to finally meet this governess and time-misplaced sister of Carolyn he had never met. Upon holding her fingers, Vicki gasped and lightly swayed with confusion. Barnabas wanted her to meet George and Jenny McBeal but hesitated from the introductions to see Vicki met with confusion upon meeting Quentin. Peter rushed to her side.

"Vicki, are you all right?"

"Sorry, Quentin…" Vicki gasped and recomposed herself. "I just had a strange feeling of uncertainty upon seeing your face." She looked to Peter then to Willie and Sara sipping sherry by the fireplace under the portrait of Isaac Collins. "I know you, but… it feels fake. I don't know how, but…"

Barnabas, Willie and Angelique exchanged glances. Maybe Vicki retained some memories of their true history after all.

"Vicki, would you like me to help you upstairs?" Sara advanced on her former governess.

"No, Sara, I'll be all right."

"Perhaps it was the veal at dinner…" Barnabas looked fleetingly to Josette then to Angelique. "I thought it was a might under cooked." He raised his glass and poured the last of his brandy down his throat.

"I hope you're blaming the servants and not me." Angelique looked up from the sofa by his side. "I have not cooked by wood-burning stove in ages."

"Well, what else would you cook from?" George asked and Angelique quickly found herself at the target of several confused faces. Sara lightly tilted her head toward her, and Josette seemed to pose with her sherry. Naomi looked over from the fireplace where she rested her bones. Quentin and Willie forced out some restained chuckling.

"Private joke…" Barnabas stepped forward. "When we met in Martinique, I showed Angelique how the Native Pueblo tribes of the Southwest United States Territories cooked by heating rocks to bake bread." He gasped awkwardly. It was not a good answer, but it would break the confusion. "Truth be told, Angelique has the staff cover most of the meals." He looked up to the doors of the drawing room. Willie and Sara's son, Jason Roger Loomis was standing there waiting for his chance to speak before his elders. It was quite a change for the miscreant heir whose true personality was often loud and explosive. Garbed in the attire of the time, J.R's typically wild hair was combed back into a small tail and he sported a large dark brown beard covering much of his face. Willie turned to face the young man.

"Father, I apologize for interrupting, but I bring a message from Boston from Mr. McGuire." J.R. spoke flatly.

"Jason?" Willie looked around nervously.

"He won't be able to make the wedding of William to the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. McBeal."

"Did he say why?"

"No, but I would expect his sitting in a jail cell had something to do with it." J.R. commented with a wry pitch to his voice. Without knowing it, he had added another element to the strange mystery of the two merged histories. "May I be excused?"

"Yes, of course…"

"Thank you," He looked to Angelique. "Aunt Ann, might I receive a meal from you?"

"The servants will make you a plate." Angelique replied.

"Thank you…" The former scoundrel turned away still dusting dust from his boots and cape from his horse ride from Boston. He would have preferred to come up in the carriage with his parents and siblings, but instead, he had to stay behind and bring news from his father's old friends. After a choice dinner of partially undercooked veal with stewed tomatoes, whole potatoes and fresh bread, he sought the company of his cousins. William was off with Ally somewhere. Sara and Lizzie were in town looking for dresses to wear to the wedding and his eighteen-year-old brother, Christopher, was off with Jamison to Rockport to find dates in time for the wedding. That left his cousin, Gabriel and Quentin the Younger, two flighty boys he tried to avoid at all costs and Josette's daughter, Amanda, prowling the estate somewhere.

"Hello, Cousin…" Amanda stood on the top landing of the back stairway between the dining room and the drawing room. She appeared before him dressed in a tight full-length dress, her figure about to burst from the bodice. Her long red hair was darker, almost auburn. A secretive grin joined by mischievous eyes decorated her face.

"What do you want?"

"I made something for you." She pulled out a rag doll in tiny clothes made from tatters of his old clothing. It had a tiny face and beard painted on it, and its hairline had been specifically painted to resemble his.

"What's that ugly thing?"

"J.R., it's you!" She grinned very pleased over it. "I worked very hard on it."

"You shouldn't have…" He continued onward to his room, but she stopped him and pulled a fingerful of beard from his face. Wincing from the pain, he turned round with one eye opened, the other tearing up and contorted in pain. He watched as Amanda tucked the hair from his beard into her doll.

"And now it is exactly like you!" She grinned effervescently. J.R. could only rub his face and wait for the pain of his damaged follicles to go away.

"Jamison was right." He commented openly. "You're crazy…" He turned away from her looking for his room and bags amidst the extra rooms of the great house. Behind him, Amanda smacked the wall with the doll, and J.R. clutched his head from the violent reverberation through his head. He was feeling what the doll was experiencing. It felt as if his head was exploding, and his eyes were on fire. Pulling a long knitting needle from her long skirts, Amanda stabbed the doll, and J.R. reeled not just from the pain in his head but to something piercing his chest through his back. Hitting the threshold into the upstairs hall, he screamed outward in pain.

"J.R.?" Amanda stood over him with a nasty little grin and shook her doll in his face. "What seems to be the trouble? Does someone have a spell on you?" She cackled happily over her power over him. From behind her, she heard her Aunt Sara running from the downstairs drawing room with her former governess. Coming behind Victoria, Angelique stopped at the bottom stairs and looked up to the top railing. They had heard the screams and came running. Amanda hid her doll behind her back.

"Jason Roger…" Sara Loomis came after her son. "Jason Roger… What's wrong?" She hovered over him on the balcony. The former miscreant couldn't move. His back was arched back in pain; his hands were up over his head. He acted as if he were paralyzed.

"I don't know what happened." Amanda feigned ignorance. "We were just talking when he screamed and hit the floor." She looked secretly to her Aunt Angelique and grinned.

"My back…" J.R. felt his body was not his own. "Mother, I can't move! I think…" He was starting to say something when he screamed out again. Behind her back, Amanda was twisting the doll around to face its back. Victoria looked to Amanda suspiciously. Amanda looked to her and then down to her other aunt.

"Vicki, help me get him to his room!" Sara started lifting her shaking son to his feet. "Then have someone go get Dr. Hoffman in town!" Sara placed her son's shoulder up over her own as Vicki did the same. They carried him to his room down the hall.

"I might have some things I can do to help." Vicki announced. "Peter gets a lot of back problems when he has long trips on horseback."

"I don't know." Sara was distraught. "Why did this have to happen now?" They left Amanda looking innocent on the upstairs balcony. Angelique had moved away to return to the drawing room and the rest of the family. Partially following behind her two aunts, the wild-haired heiress stopped shortly of the west wing and pressed her back to the wall.

"Yes, why did this have to happen now?" Her ruby red lips grinned ecstatically. She lifted her doll up to her lips and whispered to it. "Hear me now, Jason Roger Loomis… Your body is now mine to control. Your voice shall be my voice. Your hands shall be my hands. No words will escape you that do not belong to me first. You will be my lackey." She pressed the doll to her bodice and giggled lightly before jumping and dancing around on the top landing excitedly like a princess relishing her dark power.


	5. Chapter 5

5

J.R. rested in his bed and dropped into a deep sleep with his mother by his side. Dr. Julius Hoffman arrived an hour later by coach to the front doors with his black bag. Willie showed him the way inside. The doctor was a soft-spoken man with fine receding white hair who wore a dark blue suit with a violet vest and white shirt. Sara even commented that he resembled her late father Joshua Collins, but minutes after he arrived, J.R. woke from his sleep with seemingly no ill effects. Dr. Hoffman checked him over, but in the end gave him pills for any further pain. At midnight, he woke from a sound sleep and rose from his bed in a trance. There were voices in his head talking to him. Voices only he could hear. Pulling on his walking boots by the bed by moonlight, he blindly took a vial left for him at his bedside and wandered out of his room uncertain where he was going.

The only other person wandering up this late was Amanda. Her red hair appeared wild crimson in the darkness illuminated by candlelight and in silhouette on the top landing, her presence seemed sinister and sensual at the same time. She prowled the East Wing as if she were a goddess of the underworld, arriving at the bedroom of her cousin's future bride and lightly rapping at the door. She looked down to the candlelight appearing at the door.

"Who is it?" Elaine protected her mistress.

"Mind your own business, and let me enter."

"Not until you share your business."

"Let her enter, Elaine." Ally spoke. Elaine looked back to her, and then to Amanda once more, opening the bedroom door much wider. Glancing once to Elaine, Amanda simpered a small grin and strolled in carrying a brass goblet on a tray with absolute dominion of the estate. Dressed in a long white flannel nightgown, Ally stood at the entryway to the back bedroom holding a candelabrum to see the room. Her long brown hair shaped her round childlike face, her large brown eyes were even more youthful, Small and slender of frame, she looked like a small girl with a semblance of womanhood. Amanda found herself just a bit taller than her with a mane of wild strawberry colored hair and a far womanly figure than this girl who had her cousin's heart.

"I brought you a hot toddy to warm you this night." Amanda spoke. "I know you may be used to the weather in Boston, but I assure you, these Maine nights can be much colder."

"Thank you very much…" Ally spoke with a soft voice of gossamer. "But Elaine already made me a hot tea by the fireplace."

"I'm sure she did…." Amanda looked over to Elaine looking quite sure to take care of her mistress. "But this will help you last through the night a might longer." She leaned in close to Ally. "I slipped a bit of brandy into it."

"Oh…" Ally tried to hold back a burst of unbridled exuberance to her face. "In that case," She looked briefly to Elaine and back. "I'll be sure to drink all of it." She and Amanda shared a secret as if they were gossiping teenagers.

"I know I would."

"What about me?" Elaine asked.

"I ran out of brandy." Amanda turned lightly toward the window as if she were checking the windows. Down beneath the base of the mansion's tower, she could see her cousin J.R. Loomis leaving the house by lantern and heading straight for the path to the Old House. A slight grin to her face, she checked the windows of the guest room and dropped the heavy curtains to hold back the cold air on the glass.

"This room should be warm in no time." She spoke warmly. "Have a good night." The wild-haired governess shined in the light of the fireplace of the room and stepped back. Elaine opened the door for her and closed it behind it.

"I have never felt such a warm welcome from a family." Ally lifted the brass goblet from the tray where Amanda had left it. She sniffed its vapor rising up over the tip of it and lightly tasted it on her tongue.

"I don't trust her." Elaine commented.

"Oh, Elaine…" Ally sipped more of the hot toddy in her possession and grinned as if it was hot chocolate. She could taste the brandy and the minty concoction of the brew pouring through her body. Her tiny body was definitely warming up. She was warming up all over from the tips of her fingers to the bottoms of her toes.

"You're going to be inebriated in the morning if you drink it that fast." Elaine watched as Ally paused to take a breath then quickly took another swallow of the hot drink. It was warming her in more ways than one. Her heart was beating faster, and her skin felt as if it was glowing. A strange feeling came over her as if she had been bewitched.

"Off to your room…" Ally turned Elaine away. "I wish to be alone."

"Yes, mistress…" Against her better judgment, Elaine bowed and took step as incidents began happening that would affect everything to come. Guided by his lantern, Jason Roger Loomis crossed the wilderness on the estate and came upon the clearing at the base of the hill where the Collins Ancestral Home rested. Known to the family as the Old House, it was briefly left empty when the main house was completed, but Barnabas had left it to his Cousin Quentin in this altered timeline of events. In the darkness of the halls, Quentin roamed the downstairs poking through the papers of Joshua Collins, August Collins and Isaac Collins. Nothing in these journals and letters told him why history had been warped so severely. Maybe it was not the machinations of his great-uncle and namesake Quentin Collins who now lived on the estate as a twelve-year boy with his brother Gabriel. As an adult, the man had figured out how to use the mystical ley lines under the hill the estate rested on to create a stairway through time. Julia Hoffman had discovered it in another reality, both she and Barnabas had used it to travel back in time to the 1840s and then to travel forward in time to the 1970s. That was twenty years ago by his rational mind. It ceased to exist in their timeline, but could it still exist in another timeline? Could that be why they were all back in the Early Nineteenth Century?

"Father, are you still up?" His son, Jamison, wandered into the parlor and found him at the desk with the kerosene lamp burning. Tall and handsome with a soldier's build and frame with stoic eyes and long hair tied back behind his tresses, the wayward son returned home through the rear of the house trying not to wake his parents. Dropping his pack and riding hat in the chair, he draped his riding crop over the bottom of the staircase banister.

"I'm trying to solve a problem annoying me." Quentin leaned back in utter defeat and rubbed his eyes before looking up again. "Jamison," He tilted his head back and looked to his son in his period appropriate attire. "Are you sure you don't feel anything different than today to a few weeks ago?"

"No…"

"That's what I was afraid of…" Quentin hoped Jamison recalled being a football player in high school or borrowing his car to take his friends to Acacia State Forest. "I just gotta hope Barnabas and Angelique are having better luck." He stood feeling his bones cracking and his spine aching from the chair. "I'm going to bed… Lock up when you go to bed."

"From who?"

"Just do it…" Quentin missed hamburgers, in-door plumbing and air conditioning. He had lived the 1890s, but he was going to fight this 1840s nightmare excursion trip until he went down. Watching him head upstairs, Jamison looked around once, blew out the lamp at the desk of the parlor and started for his room as well, but as he crossed the entry hall, he heard a light rapping at the doors. Turning to the sound, he recognized Jason Roger entering the domicile.

"Forget it…" Jamison knew what he wanted. "I'm not going and wooing the Reverend Trask's twin daughters with you under darkness. I just spent the entire day carousing with the McBeal's other daughter, and I've not the energy for another adventure."

"I'm not here for that…" Jason Roger shook his head with the same manipulative swagger he had as a teenage miscreant from the 1980s. "You know, our cousin William was very bothered that you were not here at dinner to meet his bride. I came to gather you to rectify the manner."

"I spent the day with her sister; that's close enough."

"So you're not coming back with me to meet her?"

"It's after ten o'clock…." Jamison checked the grandfather's clock. "It's cold and dark and…" He looked to the flask Jason Roger was shaking before his face. "What's that?"

"Oh, someone might have left Old Joshua's liquor cabinet unlocked." Jason Roger revealed. "It seems his Napoleon Brandy fills the whole thing." He mugged secretly.

"I always wanted to taste that."

"You can have all of it as we go up to the main house to see our cousin's bride." J. R. added as Jamison grabbed his hat and riding coat once more to leave the house and head up to the hill. The cold night air took war on their bodies as they stepped off the front porch, and as Jamison drank the brandy it quickly warmed him. He felt his head afire from it and felt his body bursting with heat from within. He had never had brandy like this before. Could something else be in it? His heart was pumping faster, and the walk between the houses seemed almost instantaneous. He was entering the tree line below and arriving atop the hill at the same time. How could that be possible? When he entered Collinwood, he felt as if he was in a trance. Discarding his hat and then his cloak, he turned left in the foyer and entered the great hall for the dining room, turning just past the library for the stairs to the tower for the easiest path to the East Wing. From the foyer, Jason Roger turned into the darkened drawing room where Amanda sat on the floor before a blazing fire in the fireplace.

"I put the love potion in his drink." He told her.

"And I in her drink…" She produced two voodoo dolls made of clay. "Now, let's make sure these two find each other." She pressed the female doll against the male doll that they were embracing. Wrapping them together in gold twine, she dipped a ladle into hot oil heated by the fire and poured the oil over the figures to bind them in her mystical spell.

"Why Jamison?" J.R. asked as Amanda whispered her spells into the figures. "Why not me?"

"You're kidding, right?!"

Bound by magic stronger than his will, Jamison headed down the East Wing corridor straight for Ally. Her parents had the end suite; her siblings the other three rooms, but hers was the only one with the door open. The flames of her fireplace was casting long shadows through the room and beyond as Jamison peeked in at her. She was sitting in the window seat pressed against the glass with the curtain pulled to the side. Her hair was wet with perspiration. The room felt like a furnace. She looked to him with a burning fever in her soul, a burning fury in her heart. She stood to meet him.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have…"

"Don't go…" Ally grabbed his hand and pressed it to her face. "You're cold. Help me cool off…" Her burning eyes narrowed as she looked him over. Jamison lightly caressed her hair from her eyes and traced the line of her face down to her lips, which gasped at his touch. Her arms pulled him more into the room. His eyes looking up at him as a ravenous lioness scouting her kill, she gasped slower to feel the cold night air on his clothes.

"I can see the young beauty my cousin sees in you." He looked her over. Ally pulled her nightgown down to hang a bit lower then grabbed Jamison and pulled him closer, her lips over his, his arms pulling her closer. Jamison held her hips in his hands and tried pulling her even closer into himself, trying to feel her body and soul within his. Her nightgown dropped to her waist then to her toes as he lifted her up and took her to her bed to share it. Through flames dancing around the image, Amanda watched the scene happening from the drawing room, her blue azure eyes glowing brighter with contented delight and her lips parting with ecstatic joy.


	6. Chapter 6

6

Quentin hoped to wake up Sunday morning to Maggie talking on her cell phone and doing her calisthenics as usual in Rose Cottage, but instead, he found himself still in the master bedroom of the Old House as his wife trapped in the identity of Josette Dupres sat at her vanity table adjusting her hair just to be ready for her server to call her for her morning bathing ritual. Looking around the room, the former Collins playboy groaned at this temporal madness his life had become because of the ghosts and magic legacy of his family, a tradition even he realized he might be responsible for creating. Other families had board games; his family had séances. Some families sat around the TV; this family shared ghost stories. When the Collins family heard noises from empty rooms, they just naturally assumed it was the spirits of lost family members, other more rational people in more traditional families would just call it a loose floorboard. Yawning as he looked up to the ceiling of the canopy bed, he tried once more to rationalize this bizarre twist in the family history and came up blank. He looked once more to his wife.

"Maggie?" Quentin tested her.

"What? What did you call me?" His wife was still trapped in the identity of Josette DuPes…

"Oh, I was just…" Quentin tried to quickly improvise his snafu. "I was just… picturing us with another child… another girl just like Amanda. Maggie, I mean, Margaret would be an excellent name for her…"

Josette's face filled with love and admiration to him.

"Another child, my dear husband…" Josette shined and considered the idea. "I love the idea. Both of our children are grown, and before long we may have grandchildren." She paused to kiss him. "What took you so long to consider it?"

"I just never realized till now that I loved being a father." He knew the real truth. As a local businesswoman and member of the city council, Maggie didn't want another child, but as Josette, she was a woman of the Nineteenth Century, a mother and a devoted wife. It was the one thing he was going to miss if things went back to normal. It was a type of life William Collins of which had no memory. He had been a writer, a traveler and a paranormal explorer. Now, he was an advisor, adjutant and assistant to Mayor Lionel Wendall Arthur, the local mayor, a position granted to him by Arthur himself. In both lives, he was a romantic, and his Old World personality fit more appropriate in this time period than in the Late for Sunday Breakfast with his family and future family, he headed to the East Wing to greet his potential bride and escort her to the dining room. Coming up the short flight of steps to the East Wing, he looked up to his would-be sister-in-law coming toward him. Her blonde hair was trussed back tightly in a bun, revealing more of her open graceful features. Like Ally, she had wide-open brown eyes with a small nose and proud lips. She was taller than Ally with a bolder frame like her father. Upon meeting William, she stepped back unprepared to meet him.

"Sondra…" William reverted to gentlemen and bowed to kiss her hands. "Does my young bride still sleep this morning?"

"No, she has wakened." She was distractedly nervous.

"I understand you were very enchanted by my Cousin Jamison last night." He followed her as she turned around to rejoin her family. "Perhaps we may make it a double wedding…"

"No…" Sondra tried to remain cordial. "Your cousin is a fine and worthy husband for a lady, but I have a long-standing relationship with James William Stephens of Westport. If I am to marry, I am sure my family would expect me to marry him." William almost spoke, but he came upon the end of the room where the family mingled and spoke in hushed nervous tones. George noticed William and had his words freeze on his lips. Elaine paced frantically trying to find something to do as Spenser and Andrew fretfully and awkwardly cleared their throats. Spenser tried to bury his face into his tweed coat.

"Master McBeal."

"William." The nervous father looked to his wife nervously and gestured her not to speak. Sondra was posturing nervously, and Spenser and Andrew tried to act casual in the family confusion and distress that was happening. Elaine was standing with her back to the doorway of the suite as William glanced around looking for Ally in her room and bedroom and then back in the hall.

"Where's Ally?" He asked confusingly.

"What?" Andrew postured in his role as the comical stage actor he was. He walked into his sister's room, turned around on his heel and looked around before marching out. "She's not in here?!"

"Andrew!" George warned his son against treating this as a joke.

"She said something about getting some air." Sondra looked to her mother who just embarrassingly looked around and lowered her head speechlessly.

"Air?" William was confused. "I told her I'd get her for breakfast." His look of joy turned to worry and he turned back for the corridor to search her out. Behind him, George McBeal swatted his boy for being unwontedly irreverent just before Spenser gave a look of disapproval to his younger brother. Something strange and just as awkward had happened here, but no one was quite sure what it was, and if they knew, they were scared to declare it. Ahead of them, William headed down the stairs to the dining room. His Aunt Victoria looked up to him first then his Cousin Christopher and his father as William headed out the doors to the garden. Nervously afraid of what the would-be groom might find, George McBeal instructed his wife and daughter to help the women in the kitchen then directed his sons to quickly find his sister before her future husband did. Coming up the path of the back garden, William met his Uncle Quentin and Aunt Josette coming for Sunday breakfast.

"Aunt Josette…" He became a young boy in her presence once more. "Have you see Ally on the grounds?"

"No, sweetheart, I haven't."

"William, is she missing?" Quentin asked.

"She wasn't in her room when I went for her." William was growing distressed by the second. Not knowing the trails or paths, she could slip off a ledge, fall off the cliffs or even get washed out to sea at high tide on the beach. There were also the drunken sailors on the boundaries of the estate that could abduct her as a bride, the wild animals and other unknown risks. Walking around the perimeter of the mansion, he came upon Ben Stokes coming from the caretaker's quarters.

"Uncle Ben, fetch me a horse." William glanced around from the outside windows of the dining room under the west wing. "Ally is missing. I must find her."

"Don't worry about your bride, Young William…" Ben patted the young man by the shoulder. "I saw her in the early morning hours with your Cousin Jamison. He was giving her ride to town."

"A ride?" William was even more confused. "To town?"

"Yes, about 2AM this morning…" Ben looked up worriedly as Barnabas and Willie came to William's side. "I'm sure it is not what you think it is."

"What do you think I think it is?!" William snapped. Ben drew silent before his masters; he'd seen this before with Mistress Josette and her first husband, Barnabas's brother, thirty years before. William turned to face his father on the walkway. "Father, I want every servant searching the estate! Every glen, brook, cave and shanty…"

"William, settle down."

"Settle down?" William's fears were escalating. "Settle down?! Father, she could be sick and dying and calling my name! I must go to her!"

"Nothing is going to…" Barnabas heard Angelique calling him from inside the house. Through the side windows of the side entrance, they saw servants hurrying for the main hall and hurrying toward the foyer. Briefly unsure which was to turn, they entered the house in through the smaller entrance, stepping upon on to the round landing and entering in through a small hall whose double doors entered the main hall stretching the size of the mansion. Many of the family's prized heirlooms and antiques from England were displayed from here. The dining room passed them on the left, the ballroom on the right. The end ended with arches on to the foyer outside the drawing room where the family gathered upon Jamison and Ally entering the house together.

"Ally, what have you done?!" George was mortified at their news.

"Father, mother…" Jamison noticed his parents coming toward him from around his Uncle Willie and Aunt Sarah from the dining room and pulled Ally closer to him. Likewise, she pulled him close to her as well. "Family," Jamison grinned. "I have taken a bride. Meet the new Mrs. Ally Collins!" He grinned expecting reverie.

"Oh…" Naomi gasped and looked around the room. "I think I've been here before." She downed her sherry and pressed past her niece and granddaughter for the drawing room.

"What?" Quentin was stunned. Josette reacted unsure how to react. Beaming ear to ear, Ally showed her ring to her mother who could only shake her head ashamed and worriedly. Waves of distress were filling the room as William pushed himself closer trying to see for himself. His sister tried to save him by pushing him back, his mother tried to impede his forcing around her, but slipping around his father's protective prodding him away, he stood face to face with his cousin and former bride. The stunned realization was slowly coming to his mind as he looked to Jamison's grinning face and Ally's contented expression.

"But what is happening here…" Amanda slipped through around her mother and looked over William's shoulder to Ally in Jamison's arms. She looked happy and contented despite the fact she had shattered William's heart. Her head turned to her brother. "Jamison, what have you done?" She sounded completely oblivious to what was happening. Jason Roger loitered in back carrying a bottle of whiskey he lifted up to his lips with his head tossed back to imbibe the contents.

"Cousin…." Jamison met William unafraid.

"Why?" William barely spoke. "Why did you do this to me? Did I wrong you in a previous life?" He was more stunned than angry. It was as if his entire world had vanished. "I loved you like a brother."

His fingers were curling into a fist as he spoke.

"I could not stop myself." Jamison answered. "I love her."

"I'm sorry, William…." Ally had been avoiding looking at him. "Perhaps you will find another bride…"

"Shut up!" William's fist struck Jamison across the jaw and knocked him to the floor. The spectacle became a distorted fracas of screams and relatives rushing to get out of the way or come between the cousins. In the true past, the two cousins had fought several times before, but William never wanted his cousin dead before. Ally was screaming and trying to push them apart as they scuffled and fought around the table in the foyer. Ally's brothers pulled her screaming and crying from the conflagration to save her as the more athletic brother whooped his older cousin on to the floor of the drawing room, their fathers trying to stop them, but William landed his foot from the floor to Jamison's chin with Ally screaming her head off at the violent feud she had created. Unable to stop the bout himself, Barnabas positioned Willie to grab William from behind and pull him off his cousin. Josette was screaming at him to stop striking her son. Amanda watched interestingly from the hall between the drawing room to the dining room. Her Aunt Angelique placed herself before her son and held him. His face strewn with blood from his lip and his head, Jamison peered to William with his one good eye open. Ally was still screaming as her sister and mother shielded her. Gradually the reverb from the noise abated and the drawing room separated into two groups of supporters. Hunched over and holding his stomach over the piano, William looked over to his Uncle Quentin lifting up Jamison from the floor.

"You vile thief!" He was screaming. "Take your damn whore!"

"William!" Angelique was trying to hold him back. Ally started crying.

"She's my wife now!" Jamison hobbled on his leg. "Perhaps I was able to please her more than you could!"

"I'll kill you!" William tried breaking fear of his Uncle Willie and Peter Bradford. Ally's brother held Jamison at bay.

"William!" Barnabas's voice erupted as if he was Zeus in the heavens open Mount Olympus. Breathing heavily trying to capture his breath again, his face contorted into an angry and ashamed furious scowl. He looked to Jamison unable to understand this turn of events then to his sister stunned at the family upheaval. Angelique was prodding him trying to talk to him. "William to your room!"

"Father!"

"Now!"

"Barnabas…" Naomi looked to her son from behind her grandson. "Mind your temper!" She paused and looked to Jennie at her table. "He always had his father's temper." Barnabas looked to his mother and back to his son. Ally looked around innocently confused and held on to her new husband trying to defend her honor. His face contorted with hurt pride and anger, William brooded a minute more, teeth clenched and bloodied face contorted by murderous rage then spun around in vicious fury. He hand struck the model ship on the cabinet and struck it against the wall where it shattered. Looking to his mother once more, Barnabas turned to Angelique and followed her trying to bury his rage, leaving the room to try and save the awkward feelings of a new marriage. Looking around the spectacle once more, Barnabas marched off to surrender to his wife's wishes, Quentin following behind as well. Left behind the calm the rest of the family, Sarah tried to calm everyone then looked to her brother departing the room. Looking around once, Angelique stepped from the foyer into the Great Hall and turned left into the Collinwood Library full of the antiques in their prime Elizabeth would later move into storage. Her hand to her head in dire fear, Angelique turned around with the flourish of a Shakespearean actress.

"Barnabas," She tried to appeal to his rational mind. "Doesn't this incident seem very familiar? Your son and Jamison? You and Jeremiah? Ally and Josette?"

"My god…" Quentin made a face of sheer terror. "Could it be… Could that be why we're here? To recreate your love triangle with Josette… with the kids playing the roles…" He had heard several parts of the story over the years, but it was not until William had the family history updated in 1995 that he learned the full version of it. From the version William heard from his father, Barnabas had left for England after killing his brother, but the truth was that Barnabas became a vampire after that murder. The true story was never revealed to the kids; who would know it?

"No…" Barnabas fearfully shook his head. "If William kills Jamison, he would come to experience the curse I so abhorred. I can't allow that to happen! I must stop him."

"Barnabas…" Angelique came to face him and stop him. "It would not be that simple! Was your father able to stop you?! Think! Who would stand to benefit from this?!"

"Amanda…" Quentin immediately thought of his daughter. "Oh, my god…. Angelique, she must have found your spell book."

"She couldn't have…" The former witch fretted and paced as she tried to think. "And even if she did, I have no spell like this… To transport two families in time, rewrite history, block out the memories of half the family of the future… This is beyond even my power. This sort of power is beyond me…." She paused. "Elaine… She's my counterpart here. She's mistress to Ally just as I was mistress to Josette, and she's been infatuated with William as well. She invited William to Boston to win his heart when he met Ally!"

"Elaine, Amanda…" Barnabas could only think of his son. "I must get William far from here. I won't let him become what I once was. I can't allow it!"

"But how will you convince him!" Quentin became more scared than he had been in years.

"And lets not forget Sondra…." Angelique paced back and forth. "She's supposed to be married to Darren and Samantha's stepson; who knows what kind of forces she could be connected to?"

"I won't let my son become what I once was." Barnabas feared much more right now. "Angelique, do what you must to find out who is causing this. We must stop them and restore history to what it was before it's too late. Quentin…" He turned to a man he considered his friend and confidante. "Take Amanda out of here. If she is behind this, I want her on a ship as far from…"

"Mr. Collins…" Peter was knocking at the library door. Looking in, he too was out of breath from trying to come between the boys. Gradually breathing slower, he waited for Barnabas to gesture him into the room then stepped in lightly and respectfully.

"Yes, Peter…"

"I just wanted to let you know that William is in his room; your sister and daughter treating his wounds and Mr. Loomis standing guard at the door."

"Thank you, Peter…" Barnabas started to turn away.

"Unfortunately…" Peter looked ashamed. "Well… I think I might have made things worse."

"Peter…" Angelique came up to him as Barnabas a Quentin turned back around. "You're a good family friend. You've always had our best interests at heart."

"Yes, but…" Peter was struggling to confess his sins to them. "I couldn't help realizing how similar this incident was to that and your brother Jeremiah." He paused trying to explain his intent. "I only merely wanted to assure William that not all hope was lost, and…" He cleared his throat. "As out-dated as it sounds, he just sent Jason Roger to challenge Jamison on his behalf to a duel by pistols at Widow's Hill at midday."

The feeling of shock in the room became so palpable that no one could speak. Angelique collapsed into the large chair unable to breathe for herself.

"Barnabas…" Quentin's voice was stoic and strained. "Isn't that where Jeremiah lost his life?" He stood scared for his son's life.

"I'm much more terrified by what happens after that." Barnabas choked on the fact that the past and future was colliding.


	7. Chapter 7

7

Lara Parker voice-over: "Dawn breaks over Collinwood in Parallel Time. A powerful force has thrust the modern family back in time to 1820 to replace their counterparts and reshape history once more. Angelique is powerless to stop the past and future from overlapping. Amanda Collins is possessed by an old enemy and determined to use her new power to make the son of Angelique and Barnabas her husband."

England had passed laws against dueling just a few years before in 1817, but the United States would not enforce similar laws until 1839. Barnabas couldn't wait that long and had Peter quickly draft a writ to stop his son from killing Jamison during breakfast. He then hurriedly dressed and had Ben arrange for his horse to deliver it as fast as possible to Judge Noah Radcliffe, the local judge out at the lake with his family. William would not dare face his cousin no matter how wronged if a judge threatened to arrest him for even taking a pistol to hand. The paper sealed in a pouch from his shoulder, Barnabas kissed his wife and prodded his horse to full gallop down the hill from the front veranda to stop the future from unfolding as it had before. Having missed what must had been a grand fight, eighteen-year-old Christopher Loomis watched his uncle tearing down the hill as if the devil was after him. Twelve-year-old Quentin the Younger, the son of his Uncle Daniel, watched as well as eight-year-old Gabriel dug in the dirt under the plants of the estate looking for buried treasure he father had told him about to get him asleep.

"I found something!" The curly haired youth grinned with a precocious face of missing teeth. "Look what it is?" It was a small flat piece of glass between two plastic surfaces. In the late 1990s, it was a cell phone, but in this revisionist past, it was a strange relic from another world. Young Quentin, the eponymous claimant of his father's Cousin Quentin, grabbed it from his screeching brother to look at closer and cleaned the dirt and dust out from between its cracks and niches.

"What is it?"

"It's a king's harmonica!" Gabriel blew into it. Unable to get a note, he blew harder.

"Harmonica?" Christopher rolled his eyes and took it. "It's an adding machine! Look at the numbers!" He held it up to the light. "I wonder where the paper goes…"

"It's mine!" Gabriel had to stand on the second step up to the top of the front veranda to snatch his treasure back, but his youthful interest was directed once more to his older cousins marching out of the front entry way. Joined by Jason Roger and Andrew McBeal, William came strolling out to meet his destiny at Widow's Hill. Lizzie was screaming for her mother and Aunt Angelique to stop him. Still standing on the carriage path at the front of the house, Angelique hurried to stop her son from reliving his father's past.

"William, I implore you!" She begged him. "Don't do this!"

"Mother, go back in the house." William stopped briefly annoyed and carried on his way.

"William!" From the old Collins lithographs, Sarah Collins was reckoned to have grown up to resemble Victoria Winters had she lived past nine years old, but in this reality with the blonde hair, she very much resembled Carolyn Stoddard. Her niece and namesake, Sara Elizabeth Collins, looked entirely like her mother as a beautiful teenager light of build with azure blue eyes and regal long blonde hair. They tried to stop him, but he just grew annoyed at their imposition.

"Don't do this!" Victoria also stood to oppose him.

"Mother," William gasped and checked his timepiece. "This is my honor I'm facing. Please just take the ladies into the house."

"Vicki, get Peter!" Angelique sent her back in to Collinwood. "Sara Elizabeth, find Amanda and stop whatever she's doing!"

"What?"

"Just do it!" Angelique turned to her sister-in-law. "Sarah, find Ally's servant girl, Elaine and her sister, Sondra, before they leave! I want to know what they're doing!" She looked to her son as Sarah rushed off. "William, darling, I implore you! Please don't do this!"

"Mother…" William shook his head seeming relenting to her wishes. He took her hands, raised them in his and kissed her fingers. "Did you not always say I was rather gifted with a pistol? I only mean to wound him fatally. He will feel my pain." He kissed her by the cheek and gestured to Jason Roger and Andrew. Marching around his mother, Angelique suddenly felt powerless. It was happening. She looked to Daniel's wife, Harriet, coming out on the front coming for her sons.

"Angelique, can I do anything?" She looked worried.

"Where's Daniel?"

"He's nursing his strained elbow from the fight with the boys."

"Get him down here to stop William from reaching Widow's Hill." Angelique looked for Barnabas to return. "We must stall for time until Barnabas can get back." As Harriet turned back into the house, young Gabriel came running up in his short breeches and loose tunic flashing his new toy.

"Mother, look…" He showed her the strange new device. "I found a…. number-button squasher device… thing"

"It's merely a money lender's tool, that's all." Harriet looked it over. "Why else would it have numbers on it?" She hurried to find Daniel.

"And letters?" Young Quentin asked. "It must belong to a spy for sending secret messages!"

"Quentin stop making up crazy stories." Harriet chided him. "We have far more problem here than you believe!" She exhaled deeply and thought of a way to keep them busy. "Look, your Cousin William says there's a tree house on the path to the Old House. Why don't you two go find it?"

"Why?" Gabriel did not trust his brother. "So Quentin can push me off it? I do not want to be crippled for the rest of my life!"

"Uncle Willie!" Sara Elizabeth ran through the house looking for her uncle. "Uncle Willie, why did you…" She found him outside her brother's room upstairs from the music room. He was slumped back in his seat asleep against the table in the hall. Sara tried shaking him awake.

"Uncle Willie!" She tried to rouse him. "William has left the house!"

"Amanda…." Willie mumbled and dozed off again. "I can't drink any more brandy…." He fell unconscious again as his niece wafted the scent of liquor from his breath away from her face.

"Whatever she gave you, it sure stays with you a while…" She looked around again. Just where was her crazy red-haired cousin?

"Peter!" Victoria rushed in the West Wing where Peter was pulling his boot back on at bedside. "William left the house! You have to stop him!"

"I thought Willie was watching him." Peter lifted to his feet as the door to his room slammed shut by itself. The latch on it then slid into space by itself. A similar thing happened when Harriet reached Daniel in the West Wing washroom. The chair slid away jerked by invisible hands and the door smashed itself shut. They watched as the bolt turned by itself into the locked position and the slide bolt dropped into the floor. On the balcony beyond the foyer stained glass window, Amanda stood on the roof of the north end parlor at the end of Collinwood. Her mind was moving through the house at the speed of light. Angelique lightly shrieked as the doors locked her in the drawing room. Turning to face the northern boundary of the estate, she pictured her Uncle Barnabas galloping toward the bridge out of Collinsport and thrust out her hand into his direction. A powerful wind whipped up and whistled through the area. At the bridge, Barnabas's horse became spooked and refused to cross Radcliffe Creek. There was something scaring it the former vampire could not see. It bucked and stood on its legs as the master tried to calm and coax it, but instead it wanted to bolt the other direction into Parker's Field. At Widow's Hill, Quentin noticed the breeze whip up and felt something unnatural in it. Turning his head, he noticed William coming down the path with Andrew and Jason Roger. Jamison stood watching with Spenser McBeal and Joseph Haskell The Younger, the son of a neighboring horse farmer.

"William, don't do this!" The uncle implored the boy he once knew as his son's best friend. "Please, I'm begging you!"

"I'm sorry, Uncle Quentin…" William looked up coldly. "I have no ill will to you because of your son."

"You two grew up as each other best friends! Practically brothers!"

"Well, then…" William stopped, partially posed and looked away briefly. "Maybe I know him a bit better than you."

"Oh, God…" Quentin looked around for Barnabas to come racing up the hill. Hand to his face in panicked fear, he looked to William and tried again to appeal to his son.

"Jamison…" Quentin glared at his son. "Stop this now!"

"Father…" Jamison watched as Spenser McBeal waited by his side. "Don't you of anyone understand that this is about my honor?"

"I understand honor." Quentin looked at him. "I also understand bullets and dying. Please… you've never handled a gun."

"I've shot pheasant and partridge…" Jamison looked cunningly obsessed to his father in this glen on the cliffs. "William is bigger and closer…."

"With a rifle…" Quentin reminded him. "A pistol is a much different weapon if you don't know what you're doing…"

"No better chance to learn."

"Gentlemen…" Joseph Haskell the Younger, Sara Elizabeth's former paramour, produced the dueling pistols as Quentin gasped at the sight of them. "By my watch, it is noon straight up." He turned to Russell Coleman, the son of the local innkeeper, who ran with the Collinwood boys in less angry times. "I stole these from my father's closet." He took a wooden case from Russell which flipped open to fine red lining molded to hold two dueling pistols from the 1750s. "They were a gift to him from Joshua Collins on the eve of my father's marriage to my mother. She doesn't like them in the house."

"I wonder why." Quentin stood arms crossed in disgust.

"William, Jamison…" Joseph looked between them. "You are both my friends. Can't you come to a neutral ground to your hostilities?"

William scowled and turned away. Jamison spat on the ground his cousin had been standing.

"So this is how it ends…." Joseph mugged uncommittedly and looked defeatedly to Quentin, mustering a mute apology to him from being a part of this. Quentin looked around for William's father to arrive with the signed writ to stop the duel. Unable to cross the bridge, Barnabas had to follow the creek over the Haskell farm property line and jump the narrow part beyond the Old House. Still thinking he was going to make it in time, he was unable to see his son take a pistol and turn to Andrew to load it and pack the gunpowder.

"You know," Andrew spoke as Jason Roger stood by them. "If you kill him, it is very likely Ally will never speak to you again."

"This is not a good way to win her heart again." Jason Roger added. William scowled and looked back to Jamison waiting on his gun. Uncle Quentin had gone to look down the path frustratedly and powerless. Turning back, the young heir only saw one way out of this passionate display.

"Andrew…" He placed his hand to his shoulder. "You have been a good friend, and I will love your sister for as long as I have the honor to know her and have her in my heart." He removed the pellet from the gun than have him load it. "I only desire her to be happy."

"He's going to kill you." Jason Roger realized.

"I'm already dead without her…" William spoke deflatedly. He took the pistol and turned to his cousin already waiting. Quentin turned and came between then.

"William, Jamison…" He was begging. "Please! You don't know what you're doing!"

On the balcony of the estate, Amanda rolled her eyes back in her trance, her long wild red hair hanging from her shoulders. Her arms extended, her legs placed apart under her long skirt, she lolled her head back and rolled it side to side. With her chest stuck out, her breasts were about to pop from her dress and corset. Through her lackey, she heard Joseph the Younger counting down the dueling cousin from afar, extending her arm to them and unfurling her fingers to reveal the third pellet that exploded from her hand upon her breath. From the direction of Widow's Hill, the sounds of pistols went off together.

And with those distant explosions, all the locked doors of Collinwood unlocked and opened once more. Victoria found herself freed of her locked bedroom, and Angelique paused from trying to break into the secret passage room of the drawing room to run through the opening doors of the drawing room. Sara Elizabeth finally broke through the door of the bedroom over the Collinwood parlor and now stood as the entryway to the balcony where Amanda stood staring toward Widow's Hill.

"What are you doing?!"

"Oh…." Amanda looked wild-eyed over her right shoulder. "You could not have picked a worst time."

Once the gunshots cut through the sky, the forest opened up and the brush moved aside to reveal the path Barnabas's horse was searching for on the grounds. The noble brown steed galloped to the landing at Widow's Hill where in the glen just short of the peak, Barnabas's eyes froze in fear. Staring at the gathering of men under the tress, he slid off his horse and tread through the high grass toward his son standing over Jamison in his father's arms. It was a fatal blow to the top of the head. Quentin held his prostrate son limp body, his contorted face frozen into a silent scream. Dropping the useless paper from his hand, Barnabas turned to his son.

"Father…" William unfurled his fingers to reveal his pellet in his hand. "I didn't."

"Sara Elizabeth!" At Collinwood, Angelique ran through the house looking for her daughter. The coach had arrived to take the embarrassed McBeals to the local hotel. Sondra and Elaine were going with them, but Ally was with Josette waiting for Quentin and Jamison in the dining room. As Daniel and Peter tried to get to Widow's Hill, Willie suddenly roused from his potion-induced sleep. Downstairs, Lizzie was trying to tell Angelique about the doors locking up across the house, but the timeless former sorceress briefly snubbed her questions. Where was her daughter? Where was Amanda?!

"Sara…" She found her daughter wandering down the staircase of the foyer just as Sarah and Victoria came through the main hall. She rushed to her and pulled her close, caressing her blank face. "Sara, darling…" She stroked the girl's long blonde hair. "What's wrong? Why aren't you talking? Where's Amanda?!"

The young beauty lifted her head as if she had just noticed her mother.

"Who's Amanda?"

Angelique gasped and felt her heart sink in terror. Her mouth dropped open

"What happened to her?" Victoria asked as Sarah gasped from the strange response.

"Sara, Vicki, take her to her room…" Angelique turned as a woman possessed. "There is something I must do!" She knew who the enemy was now, and she intended to face her. She charged from the mansion as a woman possessed, a mother who would give her life for her children. Hurrying as fast as she could for the Old House in her skirts, she charged through the front doors of the ancestral manor, briefly glancing in the parlor and marching up to the room she knew as her daughter's in her time. Amanda presided in it in this time, her head whipping to face her as the furious mother came to confront her.

"How did you do this?!" She confronted the young redhead. "How did you change history?"

"You're mad!" Amanda backed from her. "I have no idea what you're talking about!"

"You've rewritten history only to recreate it the way you want it!" She faced the girl down. "You are not marrying my son, Amanda, and I'll be damned if I'm letting you place his father's curse on him as well!"

"Get away from me!" Amanda tried running past her to get to her mother, but Angelique grabbed her and pushed her to the closet.

"Tell me the truth!" She pushed Amanda struggling against her to the wall near the mirror, but it was not Amanda she was holding in the mirror. It was Cheryl Harridge. Her eyes widened from the shocking realization. Amanda had the sorceress's life force!

"The funny places we find ourselves, Angelique." The sorceress spoke from the mirror. "How do you like my little protégé?"

"No!" Angelique recognized the sorceress who had once claimed her son as her own. "It's not possible! I destroyed you!" Amanda grabbed the vase by her side and shattered it over her aunt's head, knocking her out and dropping her to the floor. Fighting to stay awake, the timeless sorceress clung to Amanda trying to stay awake but her mind and body fought against her and she drifted off to unconsciousness. Her rich azure eyes closed even as she felt her knees hit the floor. When she finally awoke, she thought it had only been a minute. Her addled brain slow to wake, Angelique sleepily opened her eyes. When she woke again, she found herself in pain. Her body was being held by her arms chained over her head with arms stretched out by supporting her body weight. Her mouth had been gagged by a rag tied round her head, and her legs were chained to the floor under her. She was in the Old House basement, and J.R. was bricking her up into the wall. He lifted one brick, placed mortar on it from a dowel and placed it in the wall. Behind him, Amanda watched to be sure her aunt would not be around to bother her any more. Struggling against her chains, Angelique mumbled and grunted from behind her gag.

"I'm sorry, Aunt An…" Amanda stood resolved and determined. "I would have loved having you as my mother-in-law, but I can't have anyone stop me from making William my husband… even you."

J.R. continued blindly stacking bricks and mortar. Her voice silently muffled, Angelique flailed and fought to try and get free.

"Ironic, isn't it?" Amanda looked through the dwindling hole in the wall. "That you yourself would fall victim of a variant of the same events that you yourself created many years ago." She leaned in closer. "Payback can be a bitch."

Angelique inaudibly screamed as her own nephew placed the last bricks into the space in the wall.

"Goodbye, Miranda Du Val…" Amanda spoke her aunt's real name. "You will not be missed…"

Angelique's window of light shrunk to one square block of light, and with her voice erupting into a light giggle, Amanda desired to place that in place herself!


	8. Chapter 8

8

Once he heard the news, Constable Aaron Patterson had William arrested for questioning in his cousin's death. Josette was inconsolable, screaming a volley of curses to William as Patterson's men and a few locals dragged him off the grounds, but Ally was much more volatile in her grief. She cursed at him even more, and threw his engagement ring at him on the veranda as Quentin and Peter carried Jamison's body home from off the cliff. The first thing Barnabas did was ask his sister and brother on his wife's whereabouts. They said she was helping Naomi, but her mother and her regular nurse said Angelique had raced out of the house after hearing the gunshots. He looked in on Sara Elizabeth, she was sleeping silently in her room upstairs, but after William was taken off the estate, Barnabas knew he had to be there for him as well. It was then that Quentin, Barnabas and Peter appealed to William's employer, Mayor Lionel Arthur, at City Hall for clemency. Given the passion of the circumstances, Arthur allowed Collinsport's favorite son to leave jail, but he would not get to keep his position in city hall.

"Angelique…" Barnabas woke tired and emotionally wrought the following morning. He had not returned until after dark after the events of the following day and had just retired to bed without looking into it. Rising without her, he looked for her downstairs in the kitchen where he met his sister and brother once more making Collinwood their home.

"Sara, Daniel…" He strolled in tired and reached for the metal coffee pot on the wood-burning stove. "Where's Angelique?"

"I believe she may be out." Daniel was a tall robust figure with dark brown hair, piercing brown eyes and thick sideburns under his hair pulled back tight behind his head. A former soldier in the Maine Third Battalion, he now worked taking care of the Collins interests in Bangor, often taking trips to Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

"I haven't seen her myself, but…" Sarah gasped silently as a servant refilled her coffee cup. "I think she's helping Josette cover funeral arrangements for Jamison."

"Oh…" Barnabas was spiritually defeated after yesterday's events. "Is Sara Elizabeth doing better?"

"She's better…" Sarah thought about her young namesake. "She doesn't what happened to her, but Victoria is watching over her." She paused to sip her morning coffee as the servants produced scrambled eggs, cooked ham and fried potatoes for the morning breakfast. Daniel took some bread to butter as his mother entered the room assisted by her nurse. Looking at her surviving children, the elderly matriarch took her seat at the end of the table and waited for her plate. Her face alighted before her children.

"Interesting day we had yesterday." She announced in this calm after the storm. "Very much like you and your brother, Jeremiah, Barnabas."

"Repentantly…" Barnabas dabbed his bread in his meal. "Angelique and I were commenting on it ourselves."

"It seems like relationships are one thing the Collins shall often be unlucky…" Daniel heard his boys tearing up the back stairs with Harriett trying to control them. Young Quentin hurried to the table and quickly grabbed some toast, but Gabriel quickly grabbed his spoon and started rapping it on his metal plate. Harriet took it from him and gave him a piece of bread to distract him.

"Barnabas…" She looked up. "Have you seen Angelique this morning?"

"No, I haven't." The family patriarch sliced into the ham on his plate. "She was up before I rose."

"Oh…" The Collinsport native looked to Daniel and then to Sara briefly. "It's just that she usually helps me with the boys."

"I think she's helping Josette at the Old House." Sarah spoke. "Barnabas, have you looked in on William?"

"I don't know what to say to him." Barnabas dabbed his lips with his napkin and looked to his mother. "Mother, how do you think I should handle this?"

"Barnabas…" Naomi was pouring a little sherry into her morning coffee. "This is a time a boy needs his mother. He will come for your advice when he is ready." She sipped her morning drink then tapped it with more sherry. "He must find his own destiny."

"Good morning…" Victoria entered the breakfast nook with Peter and Willie coming behind. Willie kissed his wife and took Daniel's seat from him as the heir rose to stretch his feet. Lizzie came down beyond her father and kissed her grandmother. Vicki helped serve Peter from the bowls and platters at the table as servants moved around the tables refilling the family's coffee cups.

"Barnabas…" Victoria sat by Harriett. "How is William doing? I felt so sad for him."

"I'm sure he has his mother."

"He also has that bottle of Scotch I gave him." Jason Roger entered the room as well upon hearing the conversation. "We polished that thing off over the night."

"Jason Roger…" Sarah looked up annoyed. "Stay out of your grandfather's liquor! Willie talk to him!"

"Carolyn, right now I'm not sure what hit me…." Willie sat at the table just a bit hung-over.

"What did you call me?"

"Sarah, I'm sorry…" Willie rolled his face over and took a piece of toast. "I haven't been this buzzed in years. What the heck was in that brandy Amanda gave me?"

"Amanda?!" Barnabas snapped to life and panicked. "Has anyone seen Angelique at all this morning?!" He stood alarmed at the end of the table. Everyone looked around at each other. Harriet asked her boys, and Victoria glanced at the confused faces, but Barnabas felt a sudden alarm and left the table to enter the main dining room, briskly walking past the tables for the back stairwell, he called for his wife through the house, stopping Diane and Melissa, two of the servants. They had not seen her either. Marching the length of the house, he came down in the foyer calling out for his wife. What had happened? Where had she gone? This was wrong… very wrong…

"Ben!" Barnabas tossed opened the front doors of the estate and found his father's retired manservant sitting on the landing across from the doors trying to rewind a fishing reel. "Ben, have you seen Angelique?"

"Not since yesterday afternoon…" The elderly former manservant leaned on the stone railing to spare his knee his full weight.

"When exactly?"

"When you left to see Judge Radcliffe…"

"Barnabas…" Victoria came running out as well. "What's going on? What can I do to help?"

"Victoria," Barnabas turned to the lost heiress. "Do you recall anything from my aborted marriage to Josette?! My experience with Jeremiah, do you recall any of it?"

"I try not to recall it." She faced him on the front veranda of the estate as the sun shone down on him. "It was so horrible. I'm only happy that you found a new life with Angelique by your side."

"Victoria, there was so much going on that you never realized!" He needed her help. "Collinwood was under a curse back then, and somehow, the curse has returned. It's going to take my son's life as it almost took mine!"

"A witch in Collinwood?" Ben recalled that horrible mess. "Master Barnabas, I'm too old to live through that again!"

"Ben, you have served me more than any other man; your adventures are over." Barnabas turned to Vicki. "Victoria, search the house for Angelique. Before I do anything else, I must get my son far from here…"

"Master Barnabas," Ben stopped him once more just as he started to turn away. "I saw young William leaving the estate this morning. He was going to town."

"What?" The terrified father was taken aback. He looked to Victoria and back to Ben. "Vicki, send Peter and Willie to bring him back and make sure he doesn't escape them. We must tear apart Collinwood for Angelique. I believe she might be in danger!" He returned to the house and faced Sarah and Daniel, having them manage the servants to search the house and the grounds. Peter rode to town to require Constable Patterson's help to send messages to every shop, market and business in town. From the Briscoe Funeral Home, Quentin heard about the drastic search and excused himself from attending to his son's burial in the family plot. When Amanda heard the news, he thought he saw a light grin from her face, a glimmer of recognition, but he refused to believe she was responsible. He left Josette, Amanda and Ally with the family carriage and borrowed a horse from Nathan Ford at the stable to ride back to Collinwood. He was starting to hate these supernatural family crisises that hit the family every couple months; this one sent him back in time to before he had been born. The only thing that kept him from going mad was the hope that if time was restored that Jamison would still be alive and William and Ally would be married and in love with each other once more.

"Have you found anything?" Victoria and Sarah met in the foyer.

"Nothing but a lot of odd inventions." She revealed to Vicki the time-misplaced cell phone Young Quentin and Gabriel had been fighting over and the broken keyboard of a desktop computer that had been left under the table of the upstairs corridor. Vicki tried to understand them, but they were from a time well beyond even her former life in the Sixties. Where did they come from? What did they mean?

"I've never seen such devices."

"Nor have I…" Sarah looked to her brother. "Vicki, he's lost without her."

"Maybe you should speak to him."

"My brother would never talk to his sister about his feelings…" Sarah felt like a young girl once more before her former governess. "Could you speak to him?"

"I can try." Vicki and Sarah shared one last look as the Collins heiress turned out of the foyer for the main hall. Gliding solemnly into the drawing room, Vicki stopped a few feet from Barnabas. His face was care-worn and clean-shaven now. His sooty-gray beard was gone now to reveal the complexity and detail of his emotive features. His brown eyes still impressed her. They always looked as if they had seen three lifetimes. He lifted his face to her on her approach.

"Yes?" He stood before her. "Have you heard anything?"

"Barnabas…" Victoria found him defeated and somberly watching the sunset outside the windows of the drawing room. "We have searched the entire house. The constable and his men are searching the grounds…"

"Has anyone talked to Amanda?"

"No, I don't think…" Victoria looked at him. "Do you think she had something to do with this?"

"I don't rightly know right now." Barnabas tried to think. William was on the carriage to Boston; he was finally safe. Sara was up and about and talking about going to go see that Haskell boy again. It was almost exactly the way things should be, but not quite….

"Barnabas…" Quentin arrived through the back hallway from Jamison's funeral in his black suit. "Has Angelique showed up?"

"No…" Barnabas sat brooding as the sun lowered. "Men are searching the woods, I have a reward for her safe passage home, and I can't think of what to do next." He confessed and looked to Quentin standing before the fireplace. "I'm sorry I was not at the funeral."

"Judging by the consequences," Quentin exhaled. "I was not offended. Amanda couldn't be there either."

"She must have loved her brother very much." Victoria commented.

"Actually, the two had a very strained and complex relationship." Quentin confessed. "Jamison teased Amanda mercilessly as kids. He'd bring her to tears and date the girls who terrorized her in school. She…" Quentin scratched his face and rubbed his head. "She grew up to be very withdrawn. Her mother and I were very upset when she first tried taking her life."

"That's horrible." Victoria felt for the girl. "How did she get through it?"

"William…" Quentin turned to pour himself some sherry. "William protected her as if they were brother and sister, but she thought it was something else. She became convinced he was in love with her where no one else did. Never knew how bad her infatuation was for him until she poisoned the first girl he tried dating…"

"Where was Amanda during the duel?" Barnabas spoke up.

"I don't know…" Quentin sipped his sherry. "The Old House?" Barnabas charged from the room upon grabbing his cane and his wrap from the front entry hall, Victoria trying to stay with him and then Quentin following them from behind. The path to the Old house started at the end of the veranda, past the old greenhouse and through a weaving path through the trees on the estate on a incline past the old barn, the old perimeter fence from before Joshua Collins expanded the estate and a dry creek on the way to the bottom clearing. Barnabas was too much in a hurry to be talkative. Storming the house a minute and a half before Quentin and Victoria, he stood in the parlor ready to apologize to Josette then called for his wife.

"Angelique!"

"Barnabas!" Short of breath, Quentin caught up with him in the foyer. "She's not here. Maggie, I mean, Josette, and I were home all night."

"You don't know this house as I know it, Quentin…" He reached to open a secret room off the parlor where his father once hid rifles. Upon entering the house, Victoria looked around once and stopped at the base of the stairs. Her eyes fell on the stone wrought door to the cellar. It was the only part of the house that looked out of place with the Victorian furnishings. The furniture was period; the walls were painted with an elegant green amidst baroque furnishings, antiques and decorations. It was more than opulent to reflect the style of the family, but this one gray metal door stood out without any paint or decorations.

"Barnabas…" Vicki felt drawn to the cellar. "I think we should look down there."

"Vicki, what is it?" Quentin approached her.

"I don't know."

"The cellar?" Barnabas recalled so many things that happened in his life down here. He once hid his curse from the world down here, Adam Collins was practically born down here and in the original history, Chris Jennings accidentally exposed the bones of Reverend Silas Trask during repairs to the house in 1983. The spirit of the repentant witch-hunter asked Barnabas to lay his earthly bones to rest on hallowed ground, and Barnabas had him buried close to his stillborn son Edmund, wife Hazel and brother Percy in Salem, Massachusetts. Despite all the ghosts laid to rest, so many stayed behind. Descending deep into the foundation, Barnabas recalled searching the caves down here as a boy. If it was just a basement, it would be a quick search, but his great-grandfather Isaac was an architectural madman who loved creating secret passageways and exploiting the caves down to the base of the cliff. Stepping into the main chamber, Quentin immediately noticed the armoire against the wall.

"What's that doing there?" He spoke out loud. "It will get damaged out here from the moisture."

"Quentin, could you help me search…"

"Barnabas…" Victoria was stepping on dried mortar on the floor. "Someone has done work down here."

Barnabas came over and analyzed the floor where he once had a coffin rest. Quentin paced around trying to trail it. It seemed to come from the workspace under the porch. Rising his head, he locked to the armoire covering the gap where he once sealed Trask in the shadows of the true family history. His mind was racing afraid.

"No!" His face was appalled. "They didn't! Quentin, help me move this thing!" He set his cane aside and dropped his wrap into Victoria's hands. Just trying to scoot the thing, they noticed the old dusty bricks stood out from the newer dried bricks. It was history re-writing itself again. Vicki watched wanting to help, she was too anxious to see if they had found anything or nothing at all. Was Angelique truly bricked into the wall like some character in an Edgar Allen Poe novel? Groaning and struggling, Barnabas and Quentin pushed the piece across to the other wall.

"Vicki, get out of the way!" Quentin found a sledgehammer in the tools of the other room. He charged the room swinging it before him and burying it deep through the center of the bricks hoping he was not driving it too deep, but the wall was thick and the brick he hit just repositioned itself. He hit again to poke it through until he found space.

"Angelique! Angelique, we're coming."

"Barnabas…" Vicki knelt when Quentin backed away and looked into the house. She felt her long skirts filling the bottom and the rags tried around her legs. "I hear her! She still alive!"

"My God! They buried her alive!"

"Angelique!" Barnabas was clutching and pulling the bricks in the way. Quentin was pounding at the wall around looking for where the empty spaces were. She had been sealed in the basement over night! That was over twenty-four hours with the weight of her body hanging from her arms. Vicki tried moving the bricks out of the way as fast as they broke through the opening. Some of them were falling to the ground after cracking the mortar binding them together. They found her body and worked their way up to her head hanging listlessly from her shoulders. Barnabas reached to pull the gag in her mouth. Down her arms, she had been bleeding where the iron shackles cut into her arms. Vicki tried rousing her awake by rubbing her tear-strewn face.

"Quentin, do you have anything to pierce these shackles?!"

"I've got a key to the lock on them!" Quentin turned to race back upstairs. "It's in the desk in the parlor!" He rushed up the stairs back to the main floor as fast as he could move, jumping from the dark maw of the cellar passageway and back into the upstairs foyer way. On his return, he noticed the front doors were still open and paused to close them, but as he did he noticed the figure mulling about in the Old House parlor. Standing with his back to his uncle, William Benjamin Collins turned to face him.

"William…" Quentin expected him to be in Boston. "What are you doing here? Your father and I placed you on the Boston carriage ourselves."

"Uncle Quentin…" William looked to him. "I wanted you to be the first to tell you what I did…"

"William, no…" Quentin faced him. "Look, Jamison's death was an accident. I know you never wanted to kill him. Ally still loves you. You have to believe that. I want you to go to her and tell her…"

"No…" William turned away deep in thought. "She won't have anything to do with me. " He paused heart broken. "There's only been one girl who ever really loved me." He paused tortured by his inner demons. "I married her just an hour ago at the courthouse in Rockport."

"What?" Quentin was taken back. "Uh, why am I… Why am I only hearing about this now? Who is she?"

"Hello, father…" Amanda came down the staircase in her blue-green dress. Nervously carrying two suitcases and a hat bag, she placed them down at the bottom of the stairs with a big grin on her face. Quentin looked at her stunned and surprised. He looked back to William who came up to her and took his red-haired cousin by the hands. Amanda was so happy she was glowing. Quentin noticed the ring on her hand.

"No…" Quentin stammered. "This is ridiculous. You're cousins!"

"Father, please…" Amanda tried to quell his anger.

"Distantly…" William pointed out.

"It's not enough!"

"Father, please…" Amanda lit up as she looked to her father. "I love him. Can't you be happy for me?"

"We'll go away." William announced. "There need not be any disgrace to the family. I've got arrangements for us to travel to England."

"But I'll know!" Victoria came up from the cellar. Behind her, Barnabas carried Angelique weak and distraught in his arms back upstairs. The beautiful blonde witch was dehydrated and in pain from hanging by her arms for several hours, but she was alive and struggling to stand in her feet. The three of them stood before the young couple. Amanda grinned and held her left hand up to show her wedding ring to her new in-laws, a proud grin forming on her alabaster face.  
"William, darling…" She turned to her new husband. "Take my bags to the coach."

"Yes, my love." He kissed her to her lips before his shocked parents and turned to take her cases. Victoria couldn't speak, but then, she didn't know what to say. Gently lowering Angelique into the large chair by the column to the parlor, Barnabas felt a deep embarrassed rage forming within him. Unsure how to react, Victoria struggled with her thoughts a moment then turned to the kitchen to get Angelique the water and food she needed from the kitchen in back of the house. Quentin's eyes were shocked. He didn't know what to say to her. He fumbled with the liquor bottles on the table and poured Angelique a sherry to keep her cognizant of what was happening.

"Is no one going to congratulate me?" Amanda shined with a proud grin. "Father, I have the most wonderful loving husband in the world!"

"I will have this marriage annulled before another day rises!" Barnabas turned and roared with the same ferocity as his father. "I will not let this marriage exist!"

"Seriously?" Amanda looked toward him. "Do you think I'm not prepared for your rants?" She motioned closer to him. "I was able to rewrite history… Do you think I cannot restore a few old curses?" She methodically lowered her head. "How afraid were you of the sun?"

The color rushed from Barnabas's face.

"Father, does the name… Jenny Racosi sound familiar?"

Quentin trembled in shock. How did she know? How did she know?!

"It would be a shame of something happened to that portrait in the Old House attic back in the future." Amanda looked to him and placed her hand to the side of her face. "You know the one, father… The one Old Magda revoked her curses on… I hate to see you running around the estate… scratching at fleas… Cursing at the moon as Uncle Barnabas hides from the sun…"

"Amanda…" Angelique weakly rose to her feet to confront her. "You may be able to push them around with your new powers, but don't forget. I defeated Countess Harridge once, and I can do it again."

"Yes, but Sabrina Spellman hasn't been born yet to save your ass again." Amanda grinned to her mother-in-law. "I'm pretty sure I could find someone to make things difficult for you, Aunt Ann... Oh, excuse me, Mother Collins. Do you recall Gerard Stiles? Judah Zachery? Laura Murdoch? I'm sure Nicholas Blair has a few things to say to you." Amanda turned on her heel and stood between the columns to the parlor. "I mean… I don't understand why you're all being so mean to me. I finally have the love of the one person who makes me happy, and I'm going to make him a very good wife…" She stepped aside as Victoria returned with a plate of ham, bread and cheese to sate Angelique's hunger. The two of them glared awkwardly at each other as their eyes met, but Angelique was unable to speak. Amanda had all the power she needed and the knowledge of their darkest secrets.

"Why am I not allowed to be happy?" Amanda asked. "Why must you take everything away from me? I've already won…" She started a light giggle that turned into a bursting laughter. "And there's nothing you can do about it!"


	9. Chapter 9

9

Kate Winslet voice-over: "History has been changed, and the past has been altered. The modern day Collins family is now reliving an altered version of history. Amanda Collins has been granted the power of Angelique as a witch and has used the power bequeathed to her to remold history to her making. She has succeeded in making William her husband and a pariah of the family, but she may soon discover that realizing your true dreams can be the worst nightmare of all."

Amanda had turned William into a badgered husband who couldn't think for himself. Every time Angelique tried to get near him, Amanda ran interference and kept them apart. Unable to deal with the screaming at the Old House, the disinherited former heir to the estate fled to the main house to get his belongings, but the screaming started up again. Sara Elizabeth and David tried to defend William, but Naomi recalled another time and another young heir who had lost his true love and had married beneath his station. Receiving the best wishes of the family matriarch, William and Amanda stole away into the night to make the British frigate Whistler for London, but missing the ship because of the arguments at the estate, they headed to the inn to await the next possible ship. Nervous and agitated, William booked himself and Amanda as Mr. and Mrs. Collins and took a small room on the top floor. Fire-haired Amanda was giddy and excited to be getting away from her parents, but William was nervous and stressed. The Collins name had helped him his entire life, and now he had to start over without it. Lighting the fire in his room, he rose distractedly as Amanda came to him in her nightdress. Her new husband flashed a nervous smile.

"I will be a very good wife to you." Amanda's spirits alighted to be in his arms. "I have waited forever to be in your arms… to feel the touch of your embrace."

"I know…" William caressed her cheek. "We'll catch the morning ship to Halifax and catch up with the Whistler for London." He grinned to see her child-like features study him so closely. "We'll go to Paris, Berlin, Rome, Athens… We'll see it all and much more." She tingled at his touch and tilted her head sideways as his lips came close to hers. "I will always love you." Holding her close to his heart, William kissed her and felt her lips caress his face. As he was holding her, voices from the past came to haunt him.  
"Oh, man, Amanda's following us again." He was a boy with his cousins running loose on the estate in the Seventies.

"Amanda is creeping me out again!" He was eight years old at the family dinner table as Amanda sat across from him for Thanksgiving dinner in 1982.

"It's Amanda again!" He was in his old tree house in 1975 with Jamison and J.R. along with Russell Coleman and Joe Haskell Junior and looking down to her looking up to him in the tree. The images came fast and quick. He stepped away from his new wife.

"William, darling, are you okay?" Amanda was distressed to see him stagger around nearly falling over. William braced on the bed post momentarily and stood at the writing desk. What was going on? What were these memories? Trying to compose himself at the bureau, he felt as if he was being held on trial. He had been in a courtroom once.

"So let me get this straight…" Judge Harry T. Stone of the Manhattan Criminal Court looked down to William. "You're a paranormal researcher and you look for ghosts."

"Pretty much…" William echoed in his first arraignment with the Collinsport Ghost Society. The memories of another life were rushing to him, but that was not his first encounter with Harry. He had met Harry while hustling pool as a teenager in a Boston pub called Cheers during the summer of 1989.

"Choke on that, Stone."

"Oh, we'll see about that." In the bar, Harry was known as Harry The Hat, a mischievous scoundrel who pretended to grift scams on bar owner Sam Malone and the locals. Cliff and Norm often cast bets on him. Reeling from these strange memories, William looked at Amanda confused. Why was he experiencing these visions? Were they real? How many times did Brian and Joe Hackett fly him to Boston?

"So…" William grinned toward Helen Chapel, the attractive lunch counter owner at Sandpiper Airport on Nantucket in another vision. "Do you know any attractive young ladies who might show me around the island?"

"I can only be gone thirty minutes!" Helen climbed over the counter hoping to attract the interest of the young writer and heir. It was a vague memory. Helen was only interested in making Joe jealous; he was the man she'd eventually marry. It was the echoes of another life, another time and they were rushing back to William like forgotten memories. Amanda wasn't sure what was going on. She guided William over to the bed and sat him down on it. Trapped in those images, William found himself back in summer camp. It was early June 1980, and he was making the friends that would last him a lifetime.

"I'm Seeley…" The other kid had the bunk over his head. "Seeley Booth."

"Did you know you're named after my mother's suitcase?"

Amanda slid off the bed as William sat up suddenly. She didn't know what was happening, but she wasn't losing him. She jumped to her feet and reached to hold him. She looked into his eyes.

"William, what's happening?!" She embraced him.

"I don't know…" He looked distraught and scared to her. "Amanda, this all…." He looked around the room. "This all feels fake." He saw his reflection in the mirror and barely recognized himself. "Where did I get long hair?"

"Oh, God…" Amanda realized the scary truth his memory of his real life was coming back. Was it the kiss? Were the spells she had cast wearing off? His actual feelings about her must have been stronger than any fake feelings he had for her. She tried pulling him closer to her. "William, just tell me you love me! Just tell me!"

"Amanda, what's wrong with…." He heard voices in the room and spun around to meet Richard Fish, an associate from his past introducing him to the woman he wanted to marry, but in this vision, Ally was a career woman of the 1990s in a short skirt and business jacket. He gazed upon her childlike features, her round brown eyes and knew immediately he was in love. Unlike the other girls of his past his mother tried to set him up with, this one was real; she was the woman he wanted to marry and share his life. He looked at Amanda and immediately recognized her as the crazy cousin that made him feel weird. She slipped drugs in the drinks of his dates to make them sick and lied to him to get him to get taken to the movies and out to dinner. Everything was coming back now. She stared at him scared to death.

"I gotta go." He quickly announced.

"Go?" Amanda was confused. "But we just got married!" She watched as he opened the door to the room and rushed from the room. "William! Get back here! I am your wife!" She screamed at him to return, but William wouldn't hear of it. Was he time traveling again? In another vision he was in the driver's seat of a modified and computerized 1987 Trans Am with the incorporated circuitry from the technology used to find black holes in space. NASA scientist Nicolas Talbot had experimented with the technology based on designs by Professor Emmett Brown, but it was William who discovered the technology allowed him to travel back in time to 1961 where his Aunt Carolyn tried to seduce him. He saw himself speeding toward exploding white light in that vision. In another he was in a college dorm room at Northwest Maine University.

"I'm Ben Gates." His college roommates met him. "That's Ian Malcolm."

"Hey…" Ian waved hello. "Are you really a Collins? Are you really friends with John Kennedy Jr.?"

"Well, we don't go out trolling for chicks…."

Rushing through the downstairs tavern of the Collinsport Inn, William realized his returning memories were almost complete. The shade over his eyes had been lifted and now he finally realized his life was a lie. His name was William Benjamin Collins; he was the son of Barnabas and Angelique Collins, born September 9, 1971. He was a writer and author. He had even been a horror movie consultant in Hollywood and had met Britney Spears, James Cameron and Tom Cruise; he had done things that were not possible in 1820, so the question was: how did he get here and how would he get home? He sure needed Professor Talbot's modified Trans Am now. Turning around looking upon his hometown alight with kerosene street lamps and streets tainted by the feces of horses pulling carts, he tried to get his bearings. He was outside the Collinsport Inn. His Aunt Maggie would work here during the Sixties while talking care of her father, but that was a hundred and fifty years away. The old courthouse was down the street. It would become the Historical Society in 1970. It was also right on the edge of Eagle Hill Cemetery, which bordered Collins Road on the other side. That was the direct path back to Collinwood. Looking for answers, he waited for the horse and wagon to past and hurried toward the old courthouse, following the same path he had taken in his youth for town, but now there were fewer houses, more trees and somehow, the seventeen acres of cemetery in the cemetery seemed far more spooky. Once he left town, he left the lights behind and vanished into sheer darkness.

First laid out by Isaac Collins and Benjamin Drew in the 1690s, the cemetery covered rolling hills and former woodland, but in 1820, William found less of his regular landmarks and had more trees to block his view of the light on the lighthouse. He found the Collins Mausoleum where Joshua Collins rested, but beyond that, he found the unfinished stonewall that once marked the perimeter resting in the middle of a grove of trees. Perhaps this was a bad mistake. Maybe he should have found his way back to town and followed Main Street out of town to the bridge and followed the creek to behind the Old House. Out the corner of his eye, he saw a figure.

"Hello!" He called out to the darkness. It looked like the figure of a woman in white. Whether she was a ghost or not, he didn't care, but she seemed to know where she was going. She was going deeper and deeper into the woods, following a worn fishing path for the cliffs. Dodging branches he couldn't see, dark brush that blocked his way and the detritus of fallen trees around him, the young heir kept following her. Stepping forward, he reached open air and stumbled off the back of the cemetery. His shoulder hit the ground first followed by his right hip and then his back before he rolled the final ten feet to the bottom. The landing was soft dirt and a mulch of dead leaves. That told him he was somewhere near what would be Seaview Drive beyond Rose Cottage. Groaning in the dark, William looked up to the starry dark blue blanket of stars over his head then noticed the figure he'd been following.

"Lizzie? Is that you?" He gasped. She looked like his cousin. Crowned by a head of wild blonde hair, she had large blue eyes and a very bosomy figure. Sort of petite, she stood staring at him quietly.

"I think I hurt my back in the fall." William reached to her in the dark. "Can you help me back to Collinwood?" She reached seemingly trying to help him but pushed him back to the ground. William groaned from the pain and looked again. Her knee to his chest, her hands caressed his shoulders. William got a closer look at her as her face came close to his. Her eyes were completely black. Fighting to push her off, William struggled to free himself of her demonic embrace as her head reared back, and her teeth drove deep into his throat.


	10. Chapter 10

10

What began as a wedding ended as a funeral procession…

Ben Stokes found William in the ditch while coming from the wharf at Shipwreck Point. His neck had been ripped open, but except from the blood on his clothes, there was not another drop around his body in the leaves, dirt or soft ground around him. His face was completely white, his eyes marked by deep violet hues over his face. With the young heir's head lolling from his ravaged neck, Ben collected the lost son and wrapped him in a blanket. He was just barely alive. Upon returning to the estate, Ben was screaming and yelling for help, pounding and ringing the bell on the donkey-pulled wagon for someone to come to the rescue. The staff thought he'd been drinking, but Barnabas heard his calls over his morning tea and his face looked to Angelique then gently trying to hold her back. Her eyes stricken with terror, Angelique tore from him and ran through the dining toward the main hall, the foyer and out the front entrance. Seeing Ben standing mute in the wagon, the former sorceress jumped on to her son's body and pulled the blankets down off him. He looked almost dead. His long hair was wet and colored by stray blood on his left side, but upon seeing him like this, she screamed as a mother possessed. Her shrieks of terror could be heard for miles. Her cries eventually became inaudible; a mother so distraught she could barely cry. Sara Elizabeth came to her brother's side next and held both her brother and mother in grief. Behind her, Willie and Sarah Loomis came to see the spectacle. Servants wandered around trying to figure out what to do. History was repeating itself and Angelique was inconsolable. Wailing and screaming, she would not let her son's body go. Ben looked away and stole another glance. Lizzie and Christopher came running to see this spectacle; young Quentin and Gabriel came down for breakfast and wondered why everyone was running around like scared rabbits. Barnabas felt his heart sink in his chest, and clutched at the masonry of the front veranda to keep from falling, but his sister caught him. Holding her older brother, she peeked once more to the scene with Angelique screaming and cradling her son's prostrate body in her arms. It was to this scene adult Quentin Collins arrived looking for Barnabas. As Willie watched, Barnabas felt a huge wrath of anger overtake him and he charged up to his relative, dragging him away from his horse and into the Collinwood foyer. Confused and surprised, Quentin was spun around to face the grieving patriarch.

"Where is Amanda?!" Barnabas shook the former miscreant.

"I don't know!" Quentin tried to react as angry. "She disappeared from the hotel right after William – I thought the two of them came up here!"

"I will not live through what my father lived through with me!" Barnabas's words were furious and adamant. "I will not seal my son in a coffin to be released by a grave robber two hundred years in the future! I would sooner die than see him become what I once was!" They both heard a soft gasp. Victoria had overheard him in the drawing room. His anger turning to discretion, Barnabas looked to Quentin briefly and then noticed Vicki quickly retreat. Servants were rushing in and out of the main house with wrappings and fresh water to revive his son. Within the drawing room, Barnabas and Quentin found Victoria struck silently standing under the portrait of Isaac Collins.

"I thought it was a mad dream…" She confessed. "Memories I prayed weren't real…"

Barnabas lowered his head ashamed of his past. Quentin looked around trying to find a place in this mad play.

"What's the real history?" Vicki asked out loud. "Did I really travel back in time from the future… or am I just an observer to these events? Who am I really? Where do I come from?" She lifted her head to Barnabas with fearful tear-filled eyes. "Barnabas, please for once… Tell me what is happening?"

"Vicki…" The Collins scion marched to ward her both repentant and hesitant. "We are being forced to relive those earlier events with our children performing the sins of our past." His face was repentant and solemn even as his voice quaked and strained to speak the words. Vicki looked to him haunted. Somewhere in her mind, everything made sense. Her memories of the future, of Barnabas's death and rebirth and marriage with Angelique, it all made sense somehow and not at the same time. It almost explained why she knew and didn't know Quentin at the same time.

"What happened to me in the original history?" Vicki asked scared of the answer.

"Vicki, don't make us…" Quentin spoke.

"I want to know."

"After you followed Peter into the past, you were murdered by a man named Jeb Hawkes." Barnabas recalled those events. "Peter's ghost terrorized Jeb out of revenge in 1970 after he found a way to come back to life. Hawkes was a warlock of a powerful coven…"

"I don't need to know more…"

"Barnabas…" Willie entered the room tired and grief-stricken. "We lost him…"

The father and the uncle gasped and nearly collapsed from the weight of sadness and regret. Realizing what was happening, Barnabas's hand clumsily felt around for a chair to sit in, but Victoria guided him back and to his left to collapse, upon which the Collins patriarch lifted his head to take his breath and then released it as one long grieving moan dispensed from the bottom of his soul. From outside the main house, Angelique's emotional torrent was that much worse. This was the son she had wanted from ages before, the young man who had brought her so much joy, who she had cared and loved and laughed over his juvenile high jinks. This was her son, her reason for living; even in this altered reality, she couldn't live experiencing his death. Her daughter by her side, she had to recatch her breath just to continue crying and sobbing while behind her Daniel took charge. He instructed his younger sister to pull Angelique and his niece from their lost loved one and sent Peter to fetch the mortician. Servants forgot their duties and were scrambling to gain some sense of normalcy. Two deaths in one week, first, Jamison, and now, William, and once he regained his composure, Barnabas, rushed to hasten things even more. While Daniel planned to bury William near his cousin in the family plot, Barnabas superseded him and chose the family crypt at Eagle Hill with his father. The funeral would be as fast as possible…

…Before sunset.

"Brother…" Daniel faced Barnabas. "Why this urgency? What are you so afraid of? Why not take the time to give your son the funeral he deserves?"

"Daniel, as much as I respect your advice…" The family scion placed his hand on his younger brother's shoulder then struggled to look toward his son's casket. "Please… don't question what I am doing." He lowered his gaze in deep remiss, slightly rising it as Angelique came past him, her rich azure eyes stained with grief and deep sorrow. Garbed all in black, a dark gray veil down across her face, she forced herself to attend the funerary procession.

As if having woken from a dream, Ally McBeal-Collins walked side-by-side with Sara Elizabeth Collins and Lizzie Collins through the cemetery gates a short distance behind William's coffin. Their identities were masked by their widow's shrouds, and behind them, Angelique and Josette strolled in the short procession. Jason Roger Loomis, Peter Bradford, Joseph Haskell the Younger, Russell Coleman, Andrew McBeal and Willie Loomis acted as pall bearers. By the dull marble glow of the mausoleum, Quentin stood in his dark gray suit with a black band around his arm. He checked the time by his pocket watch. Just over two hours until sunset and he was hoping everyone would be gone by time he and Willie would have to return for their dirty little chore. Nervous and conflicted, Josette stopped by his side, looking to him with the same marital admiration she had for him as Maggie did. They intertwined their fingers for support as Daniel silently brought up the rear. The rest of the family was at the estate either in mourning or respecting the wishes of Barnabas to keep the gathering small, but not everyone respected those wishes. Coming from the narrow walkway that lead to the church on main street, another dark shadow passed through the cemetery among the thick oaks, scattered elm trees and tall grave markers. Lowering his head in bereavement, Daniel saw her first and gestured to Quentin. At first wondering who this melancholic apparition was, Quentin caught the sunlight passing through a break in the thick woodland canopy over the cemetery and noticed a plain white face with a glimpse of red hair. A slight guttural gasp came from Quentin to realize her identity and he stepped forward with a mixture of angry rage and urgent propriety, but Josette stopped him and tempered his emotion with a mindful gaze. Maybe part of Maggie still resided deep within her. Quietly relenting, Quentin pressed Daniel to guard the inside door of the crypt and then hastened to catch his determined daughter. Approaching to meet her on the same path, he took her by her arm and swung her around.

"You're going the wrong way…" He turned her to the way out. "Collinwood is in that direction!"

"I am here to say goodbye to my husband." The fiery haired daughter confronted her father.

"That is your cousin in there, and his wife is already in there." Quentin stood blocking her from entering the mausoleum. "You know… the woman he pledged his life to back in 1998."

"What?!" Amanda tried to slip past him, but her father grabbed her arm and pulled her back again.

"You really don't know what you've unleashed, do you?" Quentin gazed into her big blue eyes. "Just tell me, Amanda… When that sorceress spilled to you all the skeletons in the family closet, did she tell you how this drama ended up?"

"Ally dead at the bottom of Widow's Hill…" She was grinning as if she already pictured it. "And William and I happily married… just like Uncle Barnabas and Aunt Angelique…."

"Well…" Quentin couldn't stand seeing his daughter turn out to be so dark or malicious. "I'd hate to bust your bubble, but there's a couple of ugly and dark chapters in between she may have neglected to tell you."

"I'm a witch now, father…" She glared at him. "Nothing can stop me from getting what I want. Not even you…"

"You really don't know what you unleashed, do you?" He heard Daniel coming up behind him then turned to him. "Daniel, see that Amanda gets back to Collinwood for me." He looked into her vindictive eyes. "For once, let's not have another scene in the family." He unleashed Amanda's left arm from his grasp and she swung around in her dark dress like an angry princess being exiled to her kingdom. Balding, bearded and clad in bifocals, Reverend Silas Trask for the second time this week recited the funeral verses for a member of the Collins family. Sara Elizabeth was crying for her brother, comforted by her Aunt Sara by her side and her Aunt Josette. Lightly trembling, Angelique tried to stay strong, lightly telling herself under breath the same thing over and over. "This isn't real, this isn't real, this isn't real…" As far as concerned, her son was still alive in the future marrying his true love, and Jamison was in the audience watching him take his vows. Josette looked at her then to Quentin coming in and sitting by her.

"Angelique has barely cried." She responded.

"She still in shock." He remarked. "Maybe you can lend her support when we get back to the estate." A prodding sensation tapped his lower back. He turned to look behind him in this crowded mausoleum behind the grave of Joshua Collins.

"Sunset is at four thirty-five." Willie told him.

"Good to know."

"And what do you two have planned?" Josette asked.

"A night of getting drunk…" Quentin lied and wished he were telling the truth. After the funeral and taking everyone back to the estate, he had afternoon lunch with the family then sat around for two hours in the drawing room of the house drinking sherry and trying to build up his nerve for the unpleasant task he had to do. Shortly after four, Barnabas and Willie came to him in secret in the back hall beyond the dining room. Ben had two horses ready for them. The repentant father gave them a hammer, a silver cross that had belonged to the first Jeremiah Collins and a long stake split and sharpened from a branch of pine. As the two men started racing back to Eagle Hill on horseback, Ben said a prayer for them. Shadows were starting to grow longer. Sunset was getting closer, and as they reached the mausoleum, they both could feel their hearts pounding furiously in their chest. It was so quiet in the old graveyard. There was no wind. Leaves crunched under their clandestine footsteps, and the creaking metal door of the mausoleum seemed to be warning them to escape while they could.

"Okay?" Quentin looked up to Willie. "You all right?"

"Yeah…" Willie looked up repentant. "I guess I'm just having flashbacks of the last time I opened something I shouldn't have." He recalled a certain brisk and crisp spring night in 1967 that lead to his initial encounter with Barnabas Collins. If he had known then what he knew now, he wouldn't have done it, but considering everything since then, his beautiful wife, the happy memories, the comfortable life, maybe he wouldn't change any of it. "Let's get it over with…" He pulled out the key to the lock. Quentin hesitantly looked out to the lowering sun streaming through the opening of the mausoleum and then around to the niches in the walls for future family members to be interred here. Popping the lock, Willie set it aside as Quentin started pulling the chain, eventually letting it fall in a chiming dance to the floor. Running his hand for the latch to unlock the coffin, Willie popped it and then hoisted the lid open. Quentin stared into it and felt the blood rush from his head. It was not William in the coffin; Amanda laid splayed out inside of it in an unnatural pose, her neck broken and resting on her shoulder with her eyes wide open, a wooden stake and hammer tossed in by her side.

"No! No-no-no-no-no!" Quentin screamed and pulled her body close to him. Willie briefly shrieked and turned away, his hand over his mouth. Behind him, Quentin sat on the edge of the casket cradling the lifeless body of his confused little girl. She was finally at rest, but his own heart was torn out, a tornado of emotions and tears pouring out from his chest. Crying and distraught, Quentin cradled her lifeless body hanging limp over his lap and hoped and prayed he could wake her from death's embrace. All Willie could do was listen to his pain and pray things didn't get worse.

"When do you suppose Quentin will be back?" Josette sat in the Drawing Room of Collinwood trying to keep Angelique company. Since the funeral, the bereaved mother had sat in the presence of the burning and crackling wood in the fireplace. Under her breath, she kept mumbling the same words she had silently chanted to herself at the funeral.

"This isn't real, this isn't real, this isn't real…" It sounded as if she was trying to divorce herself from reality by refusing to believe her son was gone. Sidling up alongside her on the bench, Josette sat down by her former servant and found themselves peers for once in her life. Once bitter at her firmer mistress for taking her true love, the two women now bonded together over great tragedy.

"Two sons in one week…" She turned her head to her. "Perhaps this family is truly cursed…"

"Not cursed…" Angelique spoke over her somber voice. "Just perhaps… more misfortunate…"

"Angelique…" Josette looked to her and tried to comfort her with good words. "I know we have not always been on good terms, and that my feelings toward you have not always been cordial, but our sons should be remembered by the lives and people they touched. I do not hold William in bad words for what he did to my son. After all, he did have his father's temper…"

Angelique lifted her head to her.

"And his sense of honor…" Josette added quickly trying to not insult her.

"Will all due feelings, Josette…" Angelique turned back to stare into the fire. "Our sons are not dead… they have merely been taken from us."

"Angelique…" Josette reacted a bit perturbed from her statement. "What do you mean…" She paused and thought it over. "Oh, now I understand… you mean as long as we hold them in our hearts that they will always be with us."

"No…" The former sorceress responded clearly. "I mean as soon as history is restored… they will be with us once more…"

There was a creak from the room and Josette looked up to the foyer then to the back hall from the drawing room to the dining room. Tired, somber-faced and weary from the day's events, Barnabas tossed his riding coat over the seat to the piano and pulled his thick brush of whiskers down from his face. He looked to Josette rising from the bench and coming to stand before him.

"Barnabas…" She spoke. "She is not making sense…"

"She's a woman grieving for her son…" Barnabas placed his hand on her shoulder for support. "Does anything else make sense?"

"But the things she is saying…" Josette looked to her then lifted her wrap from the end of the sofa in the room while defeatedly shaking her head in small movements. "Tell Quentin I walked home on my own…"

"Let me walk with you…" Barnabas reached back for his coat.

"No, Barnabas…" She shined up to him and kissed his cheek tenderly the same way she had when they were once lovers. "You must be by your Angelique's side in this time of mourning, and besides… I have walked this way many times… I could walk it in my sleep…" She pulled her wrap on and adjusted her pouch.

"Then I shall have Ben or Peter walk with you." Barnabas turned for the foyer. "Will you please wait for them?"

"Barnabas, please…" She was mystified by his urgency to her than to his wife. "I would much rather be alone with my thoughts…"

"Peter would enjoy sharing your company." Barnabas responded and vanished into the top hallway on the landing. Struggling with his intent for her safety, Josette turned to Angelique.

"I'll see you in the morning, Angelique." She dismissed herself and walked freely out of the estate, approaching the exterior veranda and descending down to the path without conscious memory of her walking the familiar path, taking the lighted candle on the pole at the end of the porch to guide her way. The blue sky lit by the full moon illuminated her way on the ocean of dark blue and deep violet turning into a worn path of crushed grass and dark green blades of property forming at the cusp of her feet. What looked like a misshaped ribbon of black separating the sky and earth before her became the tree line ahead of her and with it, the canopy over her blotted on the sky, but Josette knew this path and recognized the trees on her way from the elm standing straight like an arrow to the thick oak with the odd shaped pine knot. From the distance, she thought she had heard Barnabas calling to her, chiding her for leaving on her own, but the fresh walk had always been good to her. It gave her time to reflect and think of her marriage and children. Jamison had been her first born, and just the very offspring she so desired. He had been a spirited young man with a lust of life and a fondness for the ladies, and Amanda with her crimson locks were just as precocious as she must have been. She loved both of her children, and she was going to miss having Jamison in her life. The sound of someone on the path pulled her out of her reflections on her progeny.

"Who's there?" Josette paused on the path and looked to the darkness behind her. "Quentin, are you trying to scare me again." She paused trying to tell of the dark foliage was a man or just her eyes playing games with her. "If you do this, I will bar our bedroom against you."

She heard something moving through the trees. There was something out there just off the path. It seemed as if it were behind her and ahead of her at the same time.

"Quentin?" She asked again. She saw the broken fence that marked the halfway mark in the trail. The tree line was just a bit beyond that and the Old House just a bit beyond that in the clearing. Holding the lantern up high, Josette tried hastening her step, but it was hard to move quickly while holding a lantern to light the way at the same time. Soft foliage crushed into the ground under her feet as she tried moving on. Darkness mixed with moonlight and shadows spread everywhere beyond her. A shadow moved to her left and she spun around holding her lantern like a shield.

"Who is there?" She tried ordering the shadows to fall in line. "I will not succumb to this sort of infantile tomfoolery. My husband is Quentin Collins, cousin of Barnabas Collins, the lord of this estate! They will see you hanged for robbing me." She turned quickly on her way and was met by a ghastly white face framed by long dark hair blocking her path. A brief scream poured from her lungs as the powerful grasp of undead hands lifted her off her feet and pushed her heard to the tree. Josette was barely able to strike him with the lantern. She had seen his face fleetingly before being pushed to the tree hard to knock her out then forced to the cold dark ground. Her attacker was a man of fierce animalistic rage; he held her by the throat with one hand and tore the top of her dress off with the other uncovering her chemise and corset, but this wasn't a rape. She recognized him in that brief instant the moon came from behind the clouds and caught her face and what she saw terrified her even more than the fact she was being attacked. Her nephew was dead! Barnabas had sealed him in the mausoleum like any other distraught father. Possessed by urges he could not control, William Benjamin Collins pressed his favorite aunt to the floor of the woods on his estate, reeled his head back and opened his mouth to reveal two sharp teeth he quickly pressed deep into her neck.

Josette lay there unable to move. Her body quivering with fear, she waited for the shock to come to her. She could only stare up to the moon as her undead nephew sucked the blood from her wound. She felt her life ebbing away, as her mind could reveal to her was how was she going to be found. Would she be found? She wished she could tell her husband and children she loved them one more time. Somehow she felt William retake his senses. She was a part of him now; he was a part of her. Slowly lifting his head, the young Collinwood heir looked into the face of his Aunt Josette. Her face had become so white and placid. Her chocolate brown eyes stared up at him as if she were his lover. His face quivered in shock to realize what he had done. His blood-drenched lips opened and closed trying to form words. Tears filled his eyes. He had killed his favorite aunt! While J.R. and Jamison had young infatuations on his mother, he had followed her around trying to get her attention. What did he do?! The shock and fear was racing into his mind followed by guilt and despair.

"No-o-o-o-o!" He lifted his tortured face to the sky, his eyes tight with eternal regret and quaking breath and teeth clenched together with self-loathing. The sky, the trees, and the earth stood by as mute witnesses to his terrible crime and languishing pain.


	11. Chapter 11

11

For Angelique and Barnabas, the news that Josette had been attacked on the path quickly circumvented their grieving, and they rushed quickly to take control of the events they feared. Under the morning hours, Quentin arranged for Josette to be rushed to the hospital in Bangor, and Barnabas and Josette searched the path and both the main houses on the estate. William knew every hiding place on this estate from his childhood… every secret room, every hidden passage, every cave and every deep dark corner of the basement and cellar. It was time to reclaim their original fates now they knew who the real enemy was. Calling on one of the servants, Angelique was carried into town in the family carriage on her own urgent mission.

"I'll only be a minute, Johnny…" Angelique stepped from the coach.

"Yes, Mrs. Collins…" The family coachman tipped his hat to her and waited at the reins of the carriage. Fussing briefly with her long skirts, Angelique anxiously waited to restore history back to normal and to find both her son and Jamison alive and friends once more, and herself with the freedom of slacks, shorter skirts and thinner layers of clothing, but this was the costume she had to wear in this day and age. A form-fitting bodice, a high collar, long sleeves on a heavy blue cotton dress with poofy shoulders and a layer of petticoats and high boots with buttons, she was anxious to end this farce and her first move against history repeating itself was getting Ally back to Boston as fast as possible. Her family was back home, but her mother and manservant were hiding out at the local inn suffering the roles of both pariah and beloved family member simultaneously. She knocked at the door of their third floor suite.

"Miss Collins?" Elaine looked out first.

"Elaine…" Angelique met the young lady through the part in the door. "I wish to speak to Ally or her mother."

"Mrs. Jennie is arranging for a boat to take us down the coast, but Ally is here." The blonde one responded.

"May I…." Angelique gestured if she could enter, and Elaine fully opened the door. Their hotel suite was quaint for the time. Located on the corner of the top floor, it had two windows and a bedroom for two. It had a dining room nearest the door and a sitting room with a parlor set near the windows. By the fireplace, Ally sat in mourning over the fire with her long brown hair hanging loose from her head and her hands wrapped around a cup of soup she lifted to her lips to quell her hunger. Her round brown eyes lifted in deep embarrassment to her would-be mother-in-law and lowered again unworthy to gaze upon her.

"Ally, I am so sorry as to how things worked out."

"Why should you be sorry?" Ally's voice was breathy and tired. "It was my fault." She lowered her cup and wringed her hands over her face in hair in deep torment. "Why did I marry Jamison? I didn't love him…" Her head lolled to the side as if she was begging for death herself. "He was handsome and dashing, but…" Her head slightly shook as she tried to rationalize her actions. "It was as if someone else was inside me…."

"Ally…" Angelique helped the younger girl rise to her feet. "There are forces going on here conspiring against us. You must be taken to Collinwood where I can protect you."

"I'm perfectly safe here."

"No, Ally, you are not!"

Elaine stood by watching and unsure how to help.

"Mother Collins…" Ally looked to her with child-like respect and the grace of a young girl with the semblance of womanhood. "I will love your son for all of my life, and hold his love in my heart for as long as it beats. Not even death can separate this revelation." A tear fell from her eye as her heart broke.

"Ally…" Angelique stood in the sunlight of the window pouring its warm glow over them in the narrow garret. "I love you just like a daughter, but please listen to me… You are not safe here. My son would want you to take shelter with me."

"Mother Collins…" The emotionally wrought petite beauty looked up to her. "I am perfectly safe here. William has promised to return for me." She looked at the shocked look in her mother-in-law's face just before Angelique pulled the shawl down from her neck and checked her throat. The sign of the bite mark in her neck terrified the young girl inside the practiced witch.

"What the hell is that?!" Elaine reacted.

"Gather her things!" Angelique wrapped Ally tightly and pulled her close. "I'm taking her back to Collinwood!"

"But those marks!" Elaine was terrified.

"She is much safer at Collinwood!"

"I can't leave here!" Ally fought against her to stay by the window. "He'll be coming for me!" She dodged Angelique's efforts to restrain her and returned to sit at the window. Stunned and surprised by her behavior, Elaine stood taken aback for all of a few seconds then helped Angelique lure Ally struggling and delirious back to the coach. A brief message to Mr. Wells the innkeeper would hopefully suffice to Ally's mother, and even as she feared she was becoming more and more like Naomi Collins, Angelique took Ally and Elaine back to Collinwood where she could protect him. More aware of the events occurring than his father, Barnabas had every window closed and locked, garlic placed in every room and at every window. To do so required an entire shipment from Sorrento; locals believed the Collins were trying to seize the market, but Quentin claimed it was being used for its medicinal properties as someone at Collinwood was very sick. It was a small lie, but no one was ready to release fears of a vampire plague. In the house itself, Willie's daughter, Lizzie, watched the frantic scurrying around first hand. Her father was having secret conversations with her Uncle Quentin and Uncle Barnabas, her Aunt Angelique and Cousin Sara Elizabeth were racing up and stairs taking care of someone, Peter and Daniel were patrolling the house with guns and bullets made of melted Collins silver. Meanwhile, Aunt Harriet tended to young Quentin and Gabriel, and elderly Naomi rested in bed out of the way. She and Lizzie both thought the house was going mad, but through it all, a few people acted as if it was just another day. Her brother, Christopher, was sent by his father to retreat to his room for the night, her mother, Sara Collins-Loomis, and her cousin, Sara Elizabeth carried out the frantic wishes of Angelique, and J.R. wandered through the house staying out of the way and sipping from the secret flask in his coat. It wasn't fooling anyone, but anyone who cared was much more preoccupied. Upstairs in the hallway connecting the front of the house with the back, she noticed him suspiciously checking if he was being watched, heading to one of the windows covered in garlic, then pulling it down, tossing it in a closet and opening the window up wide.

"What are you doing?" Lizzie was always suspecting her brother of something.

"The smell is bothering me…" Jason Roger swung the window open to the cold air and the view to the cliff. "Ahhh… clean air…" He wafted the cold air closer in by waving it in with his hands.

"But Uncle Barnabas says the garlic is medicinal." Lizzie narrowed her eyes toward him. "Ally is very ill."

"Do you always believe what you are told?" The wide-eyed scoundrel rubbed his neck.

"What is on your neck?" Lizzie noticed two partially healed scars bobbing over his stiff collar.

"I cut myself shaving." Jason Roger mumbled very annoyed at her and noticed a think mist ascending the window and creeping in across the floor. It chilled the two of them to the bone.

"You finally got something to cut?" Lizzie had been teasing him for his inability to grow a decent beard for years, but her brother just looked to the mist building up and turned to the closet behind him. He noticed the old cricket bat in back behind the winter coats and other family fixtures in storage.

"Lizzie…" Jason Roger cocked his head a bit. "I'd get away from that window if I was you."

"Why?"

He slid his club up and cracked her over the head with it, dropping her to the floor without another word from her venomous lips.

"Because something like that could happen." Jason Roger looked over as the mist covered the entire window and from within it, a shadow had appeared. A somber face resembling that of his deceased cousin formed and looked to him unaffected by death and took a strained breath. William grinned once, thanked the one cousin he knew he could still trust and casually glanced down to the floor where Lizzie lay twitching and moaning over the blow to his head.

"Here, cousin…" He grinned covertly. "Let me help you up…"

"J.R…." Lizzie groaned in pain with tears rolling down her face. "Why did you…" Her eyes widened in shock to recognize her cousin out of his grave just before he clamped his hand over her lips, lifted her off her feet and pinned her to the wall as his teeth pierced her neck and ravaged her wound. Unable to respond, Jason Roger Loomis just gazed at the sight with no reasonable will power or interest. His sister struggled and fought kicking at the wall trying to fight back then slowly drawing limp. His hand taken from her mouth, he released her to plummet to the floor barely alive. From the Drawing Room, Barnabas and Willie reacted nervous at the noise, and looked to Angelique who stood and turned around from the fireplace.

"Now, recall your promise…" Jason Roger followed his undead cousin to his former bedroom. "You said you'd make me just like you…"

"J.R.!" William snarled at him with his blood-soaked lips. "Trust me! You do NOT want to be just like me!" He glanced left and right up the corridor. "Where is my wife?!"

"Amanda? I haven't seen…" The free-spirited prankster felt his breath knocked out of him as William clenched his throat and pressed him to the wall. Jason Roger looked up to him in deep shock.

"Ally!" William corrected his thinking. "My real wife!" His lips parted into an angry snarl as even he struggled to control the animalistic passion threatening to explode within him. "Where is she?!"

"I haven't seen her." J.R. gurgled the response past the fingers choking his neck then felt himself tossed away from his cousin. His eyes scanning the house, trying to feel the presence of his wife, William scowled frustratedly and started toward the west wing as his young nephews Gabriel and Quentin came racing up the stairs playing, discovered him and started screaming at his terrifying gaze. Gripping his rifle, Daniel's fatherly instincts reacted and turned toward the house hearing the screams and cries and raced back inside with Peter behind him. Sara grabbed up the boys just as Naomi started calling for Barnabas. She claimed she had seen William's ghost race past her bedroom door.

"Lock every door! Search every room!" Barnabas's voice cried out. "Send everyone to their rooms!" The house was in turmoil. Sara found Lizzie with her neck ripped out and started screaming for Willie, Harriet heard her terrified boys screaming over seeing their Cousin William and instead of believing in ghosts, Christopher Loomis wondered if there was a prowler in the house. Wielding his grandfather's old hunting rifle, he blasted at a dark shadow in the West Wing, and although he was certain he had hit, it didn't go down. Barred by the garlic and the cross at Ally's bedroom, William winced before them as J.R. removed the talismans for him to enter and vanished with them into the other bedroom. Elaine started screaming as the repentant father came to kill his son.

"Christopher! Stand back!" He ordered Willie's boy. "How dare you take my father's rifle?!"

"I was trying to help!" The young man looked terrified then turned to his patriarch. "Father, I hit the intruder straight on! He barely flinched!"

"Give me that!" Willie took Joshua's rifle with one hand and applauded his son's effort with the other. "Now's the time to protect yourself…" He turned and looked into the room. The deception was exposed. The fake figure recovering in the bed was a large dress dummy with a wig on it; the bed covers once covering it were pulled away. Reeling from her attack, Elaine struggled to lift herself off the floor.

"I saw him! I saw him!" She was hysterical. "He's supposed to be dead!" Barnabas checked her neck both sides and pressed her into Peter's protection. She had been scared badly, but she had not been attacked like Lizzie. Angelique moved Elaine to Sara Elizabeth's room with her mother then listened as the men stormed the attic for the intruder in the house. A cold chill invaded her spine at the same time, and she noticed a fleeting dark shape pass over her eyes. Realizing what she had to do, she turned back the way she had come and strided defiantly unafraid into her bedroom where this nightmare had started.

"Hello, mother…"

He was in the room. Trying to stop herself, Angelique slowing turned around and discovered her son clad in his long dark cloak over his white shirt, briefly stained with blood at the collar, and breech pants. Tears dropped from his somber once handsome features. His face was a pallor white, his brown eyes now an undead pale blue and his dark brown hair now as black as a grave. She sobbed to see him in this undead state. Despite his appearance, he had a dark aura around him. Her eyes widened in sorrowful fear to see him.

"William…"

"Where is she, mother?" Briefly calm and cognizant, he seemed to glide up on her as if he was a ghost.

"Darling…" She felt his hand taking her by the neck. "Please, you don't know what you're doing!"

"Where is my wife?!"

"William, please…" The former sorceress cringed in fear more than she ever had in life. "I can fix things! I can save you and Ally! Please, darling! Trust me!" Distraught and terrified, she felt the doorknob in her fingers.

"Where is she?!"

Angelique felt the doorknob and flung it open to her husband. Holding a crucifix on his son, Barnabas pressed himself into the room and warded his son back into the room. The holy presence sent the youth scrambling for the floor and cowering in irrational fear from his father. His heart breaking, his heart trembling, the gray haired former vampire stood with his hand curled around the crucifix shaking over his beloved son and his wife grieving behind his back. William bemoaned his undead state with great repentance curled up shielding his eyes from the power of the religious icon.

"Why are you doing this to me, father?!" He cowered before him at the size of a child. "Even you should know why I'm doing this!"

"I know…" Barnabas's voice trembled with tears streaming down his face. "That's why this hurts me so much more."

William grabbed the bedspread to shield his eyes from the power of the crucifix warding him. It not only distracted his father, but it allowed him to the throw his body through the window and escape from them. Barnabas fought with the wrap for just a brief instant, and Angelique hastened to the window watching a large gray wolf now vanishing into the trees of the estate. Her eyes distraught with grief, tears falling down her face, she gasped and nearly fainted from the sight of her son possessed by spells she should never have released…


	12. Chapter 12

12

Hugh Jackman voice-over: "Collinwood in the revised history of 1820 is a dangerous place. William Collins, the son of Barnabas Collins, has inherited his father's curse and destiny and will destroy anyone who comes between him and his one true love. No one is safe, but his mother still has a plan to save him and restore history back to where it once was."

At the Old House, Quentin Collins stood guard at the bottom of the stairs to the bedrooms. Every window was locked and latched and ever shutter was secured with garlic to the outside. Most of the house was dark or partially lit as he stood guard and clung to his rifle filled with silver bullets. His son and daughter were dead, his wife near death in Bangor, and his only hope was that if Angelique could stop William from getting to Ally that time could be restored, and his children returned back to life. He couldn't blame William for these deaths, nor could he blame Amanda. This was all the work of the ghost of magic-wielding sorceress trying to reclaim the spirits of her children. She had turned them into chess pieces to destroy the family, and she was coming very close to winning, but here, now, he became the last line of defense.

Someone rapped at the door.

"Who is it?" He asked.

"It's me, Uncle Quentin…" Jason Roger's voice sounded. "My father sent me to bring you coffee…" The miscreant shuddered in the cold misty dark.

"I'm coming…" Quentin hoisted his aching body up and leaned the rifle against the bottom of the railing. "I'm getting too old for this." His hands unlocking the door, he looked up as JR's shining face beamed forward with his right hand shaking a large metal kettle filled with hot coffee taken from the main house kitchen. Entering the house, the young man glanced around the house.

"So, what's going up there?" Quentin asked as he paused at the foyer table to pour himself a drink.

"Oh, quiet, boring, not enough to wake the dead…" The boy lied to cover up his duplicity and noticed Barnabas's home filled with the overwhelming scent of dried garlic. "Who are you trying to keep out of here with all this garlic?" Jason Roger mused. "Rachel Ray?"

"JR, you don't understand, you…" Quentin gasped upon tasting the strong period coffee then paused confused. "How do you know that name?" Rachel Ray was a Twentieth Century personality. Did JR recall his life from the future? As he looked back to the youth, Jason Roger smacked him with an empty Scotch decanter, dropping the older man to the floor of the foyer. Dazed and knocked out for the moment, Quentin groaned from the headache and lay on his back trying to think. His thoughts were swimming around after that blow to the head, but as his vision tried to refocus, he watched Jason Roger remove the garlic from the door and taking the crucifix his uncle had dropped.

"JR!" Quentin tried lifting himself up. "Don't open that door!"

"Too late…" JR swung it open to William waiting outside. Standing out front with a surly bored look on his face, the young scion of the family now marched forward to meet his uncle unfettered by any mystical anathema to the herb hanging around the house. His face was annoyed, his eyes narrowed lacking any respect for his former mentor. JR stood by the side with a curious smirk to his face.

"Allow me to help you up, Uncle Quentin…" William jerked him up by one hand then grabbed his throat by his left hand. "How dare you keep me from my wife?!" He flung his uncle into the parlor as Quentin stumbled over the chair and rode over the top of it getting toppled over in the corner.

"She's in your sister's old room." Jason Roger replied.

"I kind of figured that out…" William strolled up the stairs and arrived at the first room atop the staircase. In the room, Ally woke from a deep sleep and looked toward the door. Victoria Winters reacted from the chair by the bed, dropping her book and taking the small gun her husband had left for her.

"Ally…" William grinned feeling her soul close to him. "Open the door…"

"No, Ally…" Victoria kept her from the door. "Don't!"

"But he's my husband…"

"Ally, darling…" William called to her. "I'm here…" In the room, Victoria held Ally back from the door. Down in the parlor, Jason Roger lifted Quentin's rifle and emptied the silver rounds from it, then looked up as his uncle came charging at him, sucker-punching the young comedian chest to cause him to double over and drop the gun. He then went scouring the floor for the bullets.

"Ally, that's not your husband!" Victoria fought the younger girl. "William's dead!"

"No, he's not!"

"Ally, open the door…" William pined for her. "Remove the garlic." He heard the rifle cock as his uncle loaded the silver bullet and lifted the barrel up above the railing on his nephew. Quentin's finger tightened as soon as he had him in sight, but choking and gagging on bile coming up from his stomach, J.R. grabbed the gun at the last minute and took the shot to his own chest, crashing to the floor with a blast of his insides coming out his back. Terrified at what he was going to have to tell Willie, Quentin winced briefly and started loading the last silver bullet he had just as William pulled the gun out of his reach and struck him over the head with it. Hearing the shots in the house, Ally screamed and tried rushing to her husband, knocking the garlic from the inside of the bedroom door. When it opened, Victoria looked up to William's face and fired into his face with the iron pellets in her gun, but it didn't faze him. A swat from his annoyed right hand sent her sailing into the canopy bed and falling over the other side to the floor. The wind knocked out of her, Victoria gasped and reeled from what felt like a broken back as William and Ally embraced before Amanda's tall mirror.

"Like I said…" Tears fell from William's eyes to see her again. "Not even death can keep us apart…" Ally beamed to him to be in his touched once more. She kissed him once and then again. Caressing her body and kissing her neck, William pulled her closer to complete their union just as Amanda's mirror came to life. There was a light coming from inside it. Pulling herself up, Victoria could see it as well. There was a figure in it. A tall beautiful blonde woman in period attire had stepped into the reflection and entranced William and his wife with her power. Beaming with motherly pride, Cheryl Harridge realized she had found the soul of her eldest son in the body of the Collins heir.

"William, my baby boy…"

"Mother?" Even in his undead state, William's soul belonged to her.

"Yes, my son…" She had him under her control. "Take your bride, and the three of us will go off and find your brothers and sisters, and this time, Angelique Collins will never stop us."

"William! She's not your real mother!" Victoria picked up a ceramic crock pot from the floor and hurled it into the mirror, shattering it into a hundred pieces as the room exploded around her, and the mirror erupted into a window in time and space. Everything loose in the room was getting sucked into it. William pushed Ally into the hallway to say her then turned to his former governess. Pulled up off her feet, Victoria screamed as the mirror started swallowing every thing. The bed wrappings went first into it followed by everything on the bureau to the vanity table. Josette's portrait over the fireplace was ripping itself from its frame. William grabbed his former governess's free hand and started pulling her out of the room, but the hurricane was too great. The house itself was trembling and shaking. Ally could feel it getting ripped off its foundation. She could hear the structure groaning and the wood creaking and straining. Clutching Victoria close, William tried pulling her even harder from the room. Over their heads, the ceiling was separating from the house and the mirror was ripped in a hundred pieces from the house through the crumbling wall. From the dark skies, it looked as if the black clouds were reaching down to swallow the estate. Her voice screaming to the heavens, Ally reached to William as he and Victoria were sucked from the house in the storm.

Stumbling up the staircase, Quentin groaned as he grabbed Ally and tried saving her. Under them, the entire house was tilting. Jason Roger was sucked out through the front entrance doors as if a giant vacuum had swallowed him. A tornado was setting down on the property and ripping up everything in its path. With the roof getting ripped up in pieces, the outside columns came tumbling down with the thundering noise drowned out by the wind and thunder. Trying to reach the cellar, Quentin tried to get the younger girl to safety. Through the storm, he heard a hundred voices screaming in terror as the ghosts of Collinwood cried out in pain in the growling maelstrom ripping apart the estate.

Across the estate, trees started bending in the hurricane force winds, and the stonewall-enforced driveway to the top of the hill started collapsing. In the main house, Angelique screamed as one tree came ripping through the upstairs landing. Over their heads, they could hear the roof getting peeled off and the wind and rain whistling through the top floor. Tiny Gabriel was ripped from Daniel's fatherly embrace and slammed into a wall. Lizzie's prostrate body on the second floor slid against its will and was thrown out the window. Racing to get to the basement, Barnabas heard the top floor coming off next. He sent Angelique to lead the way to his mother, daughter and sister. Portraits were ripping off the walls through the house, and Angelique stopped in shock to see the stairs to the first floor of the foyer collapse under them. Along the seams of the bricks of the house, she could see a crack breaking through the mortar and feel the wind whistling through it. The tornado was swallowing everything up under it. Sara Elizabeth was clinging to her aunt and suddenly ripped apart from her screaming. The cacophony of noise was getting worse. Nothing was safe. Barnabas saw his mother rush to the back stairs just as the ceiling came down on her. His voice roared in shock to see her snatched from him. From around the corner, Angelique was leading her daughter by the hand to reach the end staircase. In their path, the ghost of Joshua Collins stood waiting for him. His hand reaching to his son, he implored his son to take it. Hesitant at first, Barnabas relented and grasped it, a sense of life pouring into his father's spirit.

In the Old House basement, Quentin clutched Ally close screaming out in terrified misery. The entire house was coming down on top of them. The roaring noise was getting worse, but then he heard something else he didn't expect. It was the voice of his son. Jamison was calling him from the caves underneath. Looking up, he could see the dark basement maw under the main house getting brighter. As the storm raged overhead, a powerful white light was charging toward them like a steam locomotive coming up from out of the light. Maggie's voice was in it too. As it expunged itself from the Earth, the time-lost former scoundrel felt Ally pulled from him and himself taken over by the burst of light and warm air. Closing his eyes and gritting his teeth, Quentin fell into place where he was. The sounds of the storm were getting further and further away, but the voices were getting louder. It was several dozen voices over each other talking and arguing. The light was so bright he could still see it in his head, but one by one, everything began subsiding. Reality was coming at rest, and with it, the ringing in his ears was subsiding. It was one person talking now, and whoever it was were coming closer and closer. When he opened his eyes, Quentin felt as if he'd been asleep. He was back at Collinwood in the mansion ballroom on the first floor and sitting on the left side of the room next to Maggie in her black and white dress. Alive once more, Jamison fidgeted left and right bored. In front of him, Angelique also snapped from her trance and looked around. They were back to where they were a few days ago! Dressed in her light blue dress, Carolyn prodded Willie awake, and Sara Elizabeth looked to her mother waking her father. Time had been restored, and Barnabas jostled awake as one of four people who recalled their lost history. Up in front of the room, William Benjamin Collins stood in his black and white suit with Ross Gellar as his best man before Ally Marie McBeal in her white bridal dress to take as his wife once more.

"Back through the looking glass…" Gasping inaudibly under her breath, Angelique realized reality had snapped them back to the present.

"I know pronounce you…" Reverend Holliman announced. "…Man and wife." William grinned and looked to Ally. She was shining herself as she jumped up and grabbed him by the shoulders. From her seat, Angelique looked briefly confused then gratefully relieved. Barnabas was perplexed as well. Both of them along with Quentin and Willie were confused. What just happened? A minute ago, Willie was in period clothes sitting by the fire in an upstairs bedroom with Carolyn and their daughter, but she was grinning and happy with no memories of what had happened. Lizzie sat bored, distracted and healthy watching the wedding, and Jason Roger checked his watch and gazed on the bridesmaid he had been flirting with earlier. History had been restored but to what? Realizing the dire fate awaiting Amanda, Angelique gestured to Maggie urgently to follow her and they quietly slipped from the wedding.

"Angelique? What is it?"

"Maggie, quickly!"

"Angelique…" The confused councilwoman followed her. She loved Angelique like a sister, a friend and confidante. If there was something to be fearful of, she trusted Angelique with her life. For the minute, they forgot about weddings, grandchildren and drinking to toasts. They slipped out the back way of the house and hurried for the garage on the property.

"Amanda left the house!" Angelique slipped around Maggie as they tried to catch the girl on the way to Rose Cottage. "I'm terrified what she could do now that she has lost William forever."

"Oh God!" Maggie's eyes lit up with concern and worry as she started up her SUV with Angelique in the passenger seat. Years of suicide attempts and bouts of depression from her daughter preyed on her worst motherly fears. Briefly clipping the family's old sedan from the years there was still a governess on the property, Maggie took the road under the house now lined by cars and drove down the hill toward the tree line, passing the caretaker's cottage and the family cemetery on the way to the back entry on Collins Road. Leaving the estate, they turned south toward Frid Street and then turned off it onto the access road back on to the estate. Restored back in the Early Eighties, Rose Cottage loomed a head of them within the trees. The cobblestone driveway out front was vacant, but the front door was hanging open. Turning off her car and leaving the keys in the ignition, Maggie stormed the house ahead of Angelique, racing up the spiral staircase and turning right down the hallway.

Maggie's scream suddenly pierced the estate.

In the altered present, Amanda had shattered the mirror and used the shards to slice her wrists. Her eyes were still full of tears. Like the events of a muted movie slowed down, Maggie rushed to hold her with her lips trembling and trying to make a noise as Angelique called for an ambulance. As the reception went on at the main house, the shrieks of an ambulance filled the estate, taking the route through the gate and then the long perimeter driveway of the estate past the Old House to Rose Cottage where paramedics carried Amanda to the hospital then left the back way on to Seaview Drive and took the highway to Collinsport Regional Medical Center, appropriately into the Julia Hoffman Memorial Emergency Wing, named after a close Collins family confidante. Maggie went with her, and Quentin went with her quickly after, but that was not where Angelique could leave things. Her heart went with them, and after William and Ally were off as a married couple, the family retreated to catch their breaths in the drawing room where Carolyn discovered another secret hidden by her ancestors.

"My God…" Carolyn heard the story from Angelique. "That all really happened?"

"Yes…" Angelique crossed over and sat on the arm of the chair where her beloved Barnabas sat and rested. Willie crossed in front of her with his shot of brandy. "Countess Harridge was behind the entire thing. If Vicki hadn't shattered the mirror holding her spirit…"

"Vicki still alive in the past." Willie postured with a deep breath and lightly shook his head. "I still can't believe it…" He dropped the 1990 Edition of the family history on the table opened to the lifetime of Daniel Collins.

"I wish I could have been there." Carolyn remised. "I could have finally revealed to her that we were sisters."

"Be grateful you weren't there…" Willie spoke. "It was a nightmare. Happy to say, I'm so glad to be back in a time with cell phones and motor cars…" He looked to Barnabas. "No offense."

"None taken…" Barnabas sat back in his chair. "But to live the events as my father had lived them…. I'm so grateful to Victoria for coming back to help us one last time."

"Barnabas…" Carolyn read the yearbook. "A bad storm did hit the estate in 1820, but it didn't devastate the grounds to the extent like you said… but didn't your mother died in 1795?" He laid the book open on the desk. "Well, according to this, she passed away from an illness in 1821."

"That's not right…" Angelique and Barnabas exchanged glances. "My god… could we have to some extent actually altered history with Harridge's help?" She lifted the book closer. "Could we have actually been there? Is there a mention of William and Ally…"

"No…" Barnabas perused the description of the family events. "But it does mention Daniel's sons, Gabriel and Quentin, and how Gabriel was rendered paraplegic after the storm hurled him from a window." He started rationalizing further. Could this have lead to Quentin's granduncle's obsession with time travel? With all the modern relics dragged back then, could the young man as an adult have figured out where they had come from?

"Angelique…" Carolyn sipped her sherry and postured a bit in her seat. "This Harridge… You think we've finally seen the end of her."

"A sorceress that powerful does not go into the afterlife that easily." Angelique responded. "She might be back." Her thoughts fretted over the other mirrors on the property. The wily countess could have jumped to any of them or any object that could hold an enchantment from the main house, the Old House or Rose Cottage. Who could be next? Carolyn, Lizzie, Maggie, her daughter… She got lucky this time, the next time could possibly be her last. At Rose Cottage, two male cousins morbidly viewed the scene of a relative's attempted suicide. Their eyes poured emotionally distant over the glass shards of the mirror, the small drops to the large puddle of dark and drying blood in the powder pink carpet and up to the female décor and littered clothes scattered around the room.

"I can't believe she did it again…" Jamison leaded back against her door with his arms crossed and hands buried under his armpits. "What the heck is wrong with her?"

"You treated Amanda like crap when we were kids…" J.R. looked at him. "Don't you feel guilty at all that she's psychotic?"

"I don't look at her like that…" Jamison answered. "I just think of her as… sensitive…"

"Whatever helps you sleep at night…" J.R. grimaced and looked back again out of morbid curiosity; they had gone upstairs to Amanda's teddy bear-filled room to see where she had slashed her wrists and instead stared at the scene mentally debating their mortality and responsibility. The shattered mirror shards were still on the carpet before her closet with spots of her blood in the pink carpet and etched into the glass.

"I was thinking of doing something nice for Amanda." Jamison answered. "Why don't we go in together and get her mirror fixed?"

"What if she smashes it again when she gets out of Windcliff?" J.R. asked the question. The two former cronies in crime looked to each other with the same thought.

"Unbreakable glass!"

END


End file.
